


That Looks on Tempests

by AMarguerite



Series: An Ever-Fixed Mark [3]
Category: Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
Genre: AU of an AU, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Battle Of Waterloo, Battlefield, Childbirth, Deconstruction, F/F, F/M, M/M, Napoleonic Wars, Period Typical Attitudes, Period-Typical Homophobia, Regency, Some mention of battle and 19th century warfare, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, napoleonic era warfare was pretty bloody just fyi, some graphic descriptions of battlefields
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-17
Updated: 2017-07-11
Packaged: 2018-09-18 01:27:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 50,142
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9359201
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AMarguerite/pseuds/AMarguerite
Summary: Alternate ending to "An Ever-Fixed Mark," diverging from chapter ten, on. The Battle of Waterloo ends just a little bit differently for Elizabeth and Colonel Fitzwilliam.Now complete!





	1. In which Elizabeth makes an unexpected acquaintance

**Author's Note:**

> I'm afraid this won't make a whole lot of sense without the first nine chapters of "An Ever Fixed Mark," but if you just want to read this instead of 70,000 words in addition to this fic, here goes: in this world, when one is sixteen years old, a name appears on one's left wrist. What does it signify? Is it a first name, a middle name, or a last name? It's up to you and your society's norms! And Regency England's is that it's the name of the person you are intended to marry. Elizabeth was delighted to meet Colonel Fitzwilliam at Rosings, since her soulmark reads, 'Fitzwilliam.' Colonel Fitzwilliam's read 'Bennet,' and he was yet more delighted to meet Miss Bennet. They married in 1812, and Elizabeth's spent the intervening years kicking ass and taking names during the Spanish campaign. Now it's time for Waterloo! Couldn't escape if I wanted to! Waterloo! Knowing my fate is to be with you, whoa-whoa-whoa-whoa etc. (Apologies to ABBA.)

At the Duchess of Richmond’s ball, Elizabeth found her attention diverted from processing into supper by one of Colonel Fitzwilliam’s ensigns. He was about sixteen or seventeen and always looked as if he were suffering acute appendicitis. When she had first seen him, Elizabeth had really been convinced he was, but as he remained in an awkward half-bow, his expression one of pained anticipation, whenever he saw anyone above the rank of captain, this proved not to be the case.

“Can I help you...?”

“Hawkins, ma’am,” said he, with a pained grimace. “Where is Colonel Fitzwilliam, if you please, ma’am?”

“I haven’t seen him since we waltzed— I think he went to greet General Wellington and his staff. Have you a dispatch for him?”

Hawkins’s grimace took on an air of vague desperation. “Er... no, madam. But it is an urgent matter, concerning the officers of the regiment.”

This could not bode well; Elizabeth turned to her friend, Mrs. Kirke, and excused herself. Colonel Fitzwilliam was talking with Lord Hay, and turned to her with a smile. “Mrs. Fitzwilliam! I was just hoping for you; I confess myself entirely unequal to the strictures of Belgian etiquette and have no idea whom I am to lead into supper, and when I am to do it. Lord Hay assures me he will lead you in, unless someone tells him otherwise.”

Lord Hay bowed; Elizabeth smiled at him and thanked him for his pains, but regretted that supper might be a little delayed, if not indefinitely so, “for Mr. Hawkins here came looking for my husband on urgent regimental business.”

Hawkins, no longer ambulatory, regained the semi-recumbent posture he seemed to prefer. “Sir, there has been a commotion in the house where we junior officers are billeted.”

“What commotion?”

“Primarily gunshots, sir.”

This was alarming enough for Colonel Fitzwilliam to hurriedly excuse himself, and they burst in upon the townhouse where the junior officers had been billeted, not five minutes later.

“What is the meaning of this, sirs?” demanded Colonel Fitzwilliam, striding through the door to see most of the junior officers up and baffled, several holding spent pistols, one at the foot of the stairs, more hanging over the bannister on the second story, and a mess of glass, wine and pistol shot all over the entryway. “I must confess, I am at a loss. Target practice at the walls? A rival ball to the Duchess of Richmond’s? And what is in the chandelier?”

Elizabeth directed her gaze upwards and said, mildly, “I think it is a royal flush, my dear.”

“I confess,” said Colonel Fitzwilliam, with implacable calm, “I am unfamiliar with any game that requires you to fling your cards _at the chandelier_. Mr. Leigh?”

One of the men gawping from the bannister above snapped to attention. “Sir!”

“You appear to be mostly dressed and in the least state of intoxication of your fellows. What happened here?”

Most of the officers had by now stood at attention— with the exception of the lieutenant laying in a defeated heap at the foot of the stairs— and at Elizabeth’s entry, they had embarrassedly pulled up or on what dressing gowns and bits of uniform were easily at hand.

Mr. Leigh, a conscientious fellow, said, “Er, well, sir, I was— I was not awake for all of it, but there was some talk of a card game before I returned for the evening. I woke to someone saying ‘Defend yourself, you damned rascal,’ then gunshots, and I pulled on my uniform, sir, and then a number of us came out with our pistols thinking we had been attacked by the French, but it turned out it was...  er, there was a fight spilling out of Lieutenant Jeffries’s room. Sir.”

Colonel Fitzwilliam then turned to Lieutenant Jeffries, cringing on the floor of the entryway. “Lieutenant Jeffries! I am somehow unsurprised to hear you were at the center of this. How came you to be lying on the floor?”

“I, ah,” said Lieutenant Jeffries, awkwardly pushing himself up. “I rolled down the stairs, sir.”

“Indeed! And how came you to roll down the stairs?”

“I rolled down the stairs to avoid being shot, sir.”

“You are getting shot at,” said Colonel Fitzwilliam, with a hard edge of impatience to his tone, “and you think, ‘what is the safest— nay the wisest thing I can do?’ And you decide to _voluntarily roll down a flight of stairs_.”

Lieutenant Jeffries decided that discretion was the better part of valor and did not respond.

“Mrs. Fitzwilliam,” said Colonel Fitzwilliam, turning to Elizabeth, with an unintentional, but satisfyingly dramatic swirl of his cloak, “you have now three years observation of the army. Have you ever seen such tactics?”

“No, my dear.”

“Or read about them, perhaps?”

“No, my dear. I daresay I should have remembered if Hannibal had decided to roll down the Alps, instead of merely crossing them with elephants.”

Lieutenant Jeffries said, in a pained voice, “Sir, I think I have sprained my ankle.”

“You did that to yourself,” said Colonel Fitzwilliam. “Quite literally! By God, man! I would ask what you were thinking, but I sincerely hope the answer is that you weren’t thinking at all. Who was playing cards with Lieutenant Jeffries?”

A trio of officers on the second floor raised their hands, and they offered a slurred, rather jumbled account of Lieutenant Jeffries cheating at loo, Lieutenant Michaels accusing him of doing so, someone throwing a bottle, which resulted in more bottles being thrown, Lieutenant Jeffries ducking the bottles, Lieutenant Michaels telling Lieutenant Jeffries to defend himself, the damned rascal, pistols drawn, shots fired, and Lieutenant Jeffries’ ignominious roll down the stairs.

“And this,” said Colonel Fitzwilliam, “when I have just told you all to be ready for some coming attack of Bonaparte’s. Have you all been looking to the cavalry for your inspiration? Have you decided, like them, that maneuvers are only for the parade grounds?” He was easily lead from this to the recollection of a very sore point, for him, and for any infantry officer: “By God, I should think the general order sent out after this army’s disgraceful behavior in the _unjustifiable_ sack Badajoz, you might have learnt something! It ought to have instilled in you some notion of what is _required_ of an infantry officer serving under General Wellington! If you have not learnt that necessary lesson in self-control, and respect for the countries in which we march, then now is the time to get out your tables, gentlemen— though some of you, it appears, have lost an already tentative claim to that title— and write it out anew!”

Colonel Fitzwilliam rarely lost his temper; when he did, the implacable sarcasms in which his choler manifested so amused Elizabeth she usually had to laugh. She hid these behind her fan until one of the ensigns managed to find her a chair and another to produce a tea service. It was past two in the morning when Colonel Fitzwilliam had finished with his officers and the house had been cleaned to his satisfaction. As Colonel Fitzwilliam promised Lieutenant Jeffries a flogging as soon as he could stand long enough to bear it, a breathless young aide-de-campe in full ball dress came bursting through the door.

“Colonel Fitzwilliam!”

He turned on his heel impatiently. “Yes?”

Elizabeth had expected to hear that her husband had left his sword behind, or the Duke of Wellington required him to come back and dance attendance on the Prince of Orange. But the order was instead that all officers must join their regiments by three in the morning.

Napoleon’s forces were in Belgium.

Colonel Fitzwilliam quieted the susurration of speculation from the junior officers with a look. “Gentlemen, you have your marching orders.” He settled Elizabeth’s cloak around her shoulders himself, and they went quickly down the steps.

That part of the city had been given over to housing British officers; a number of them were out on the streets, trying to form line, to locate regiments and friends, talking over the orders and trying to determine order of march. The Fitzwilliams had taken a hackney from the ball, and, having struggled over to the Kirkes’ lodging, with their own still distant, agreed that it would be better for Elizabeth to wait while Colonel Fitzwilliam braved the melee to find some suitable conveyance. Elizabeth did not mind; she sat in the lodge of the portress, who was known to her, and passed the time very pleasantly. The portress left the top half of her door open, and Elizabeth leaned on the sill, watching the crowd and waving at her friends among the other regiments.

One man in the epauletted red coat and dark trousers of a staff surgeon was loading a medical cart before the house when Colonel Kirke appeared; this gentleman chuckled when he overheard Elizabeth teasing Colonel Kirke for being like Dante, i.e. missing his Beatrice.

Colonel Kirke replied, “Well, Mrs. Fitzwilliam, I am in sore need of her, and hope she shall send someone to point me the way soon! So far I have had no orders at all. What are Colonel Fitzwilliam’s orders?”

“We are to Quatre Bras, sir.”

Colonel Kirke sighed and turned to the surgeon. “Pascal, where the devil are you off too? Quatre Bras? By God, everyone’s off to Quatre Bras.”

The surgeon was not paying attention to Colonel Kirke; he had paused in his work and was looking at Elizabeth curiously.

“I beg your pardon,” he said, giving himself a little shake. “I was not attending, Harry; I have only just realized that you have been talking to Colonel Richard Fitzwilliam’s wife.”

Elizabeth took a better look at the regimental surgeon. The man before her was unfamiliar, but Colonel Fitzwilliam’s manners were friendly and his temper gregarious. He tended to befriend anyone he worked with, if they were competent.

“Oh yes,” said Colonel Kirke, “allow me to introduce Mrs. Fitzwilliam to you, Pascal. Mrs. Fitz, this is my Brussels neighbor, Colonel Bénet Pascal. He is the regimental surgeon for the Coldstream Guards.”

Elizabeth was a little discomposed as she curtsied; Bénet was rather close to ‘Bennet,’ and she knew her husband had spent some time with the Coldstream Guards early in his career. She also knew her husband had had intimate friendships before he had met her, but he had not spoken of them and she had not pressed.

Colonel Pascal’s expression was one of well-bred anxiety, like a hostess who is not sure she had quite got the seating chart correct. “Mrs. Fitzwilliam, it is a pleasure. I have heard a great deal about you, and I had the great honor of sewing your husband back together for many years, when he was a captain and a major in the Coldstream Guards, before he purchased his commission as a lieutenant-colonel in the Prince of Wales’s Own. Is he still with that regiment?”

“No, sir, he is the colonel of the —th Foot.”

“Ah,” said Colonel Pascal. “I had wondered; we did not correspond for very long after we parted ways.”

Colonel Kirke’s understanding had never been nuanced; he was a bluff, cheerful man, whose chief pleasure in life was arranging his men into lines and squares, and did not much care what went in on the heads of everyone around him. He did not pick up on any of the discomfort between Colonel Pascal and Mrs. Fitzwilliam and said, only, “Devilish hard, keeping up with one’s correspondence.”

Colonel Pascal gave a very Gallic shrug to this pronouncement, and hastily changed the subject to, “Mrs. Fitzwilliam, is your regimental surgeon still Colonel Dunne?”

“Indeed, yes.”

“I wonder if you will be so good as to tell me his address, so I might send him some casks of vinegar. He was interested in an experiment of mine, and this seems as good a time as any to test it.”

Elizabeth gave him Colonel Dunne’s address, not precisely inclined toward suspicion, but somewhat unequal to the circumstances she now found herself. Colonel Pascal was a brown, dark-haired, nearly handsome man in his late thirties, in looks and manner very clearly a doctor, and one of the better classes of doctor to boot. There was a delicacy to his movements that made Elizabeth think he took pride in the neat stitches he made, and there was nothing in his manner or his conversation that spoke of any emotion worse than surprise at meeting her, and a little awkwardness in the secret they both knew, but dared not acknowledge before Colonel Kirke. She struck upon the fortunate idea of asking what the vinegar was for, and he, much relieved, launched into a prepared speech about miasma theory, how this aligned with what was known about the efficacy of vinaigrettes, and how he noticed that when he bathed his hands in aromatic vinegars before and after surgery, his patients developed fewer fevers and infections.

By the time he had finished, his stewards had come clattering down the stairs with the last of his casks of vinegar, and cases of lint and bandages. He touched the brim of his hat to her and said, “It was an unexpected pleasure, Mrs. Fitzwilliam.”

“Colonel Pascal, I must thank you,” said Elizabeth, who had been thinking over what she wanted to say for some time now, “for keeping my husband in such good order before passing him onto me. I am very grateful to you.”

Colonel Pascal looked at her oddly. “Are you? I wonder— but no matter. My very best wishes to you, madame.”

 

***

When Colonel Fitzwilliam returned, she was in a thoughtful mood. She scrambled up quickly into the hackney and said, a bit abruptly, “Richard, when we met, you said you had just about given up hope, or something of the sort, of finding a soulmate.”

He looked askance at her. “Yes, I had.” Then, smiling, “Fishing for compliments, my Lizzy? You needn't. I love you very much indeed.”

“I love you too, but that was not why I asked. It....” She trailed off and said, a little more uncertainty, “You must not think it in any way disgusted or displeased me, but I think I have made the acquaintance of someone formerly your intimate friend— a Colonel Bénet Pascal?”

Colonel Fitzwilliam said, in some surprise, “Good Lord, have you?”

“You did not know he is now the regimental surgeon for the Coldstream Guards, and in Brussels?”

“I am not surprised he is; when I knew him, he was an assistant surgeon for the Lilywhites— the Coldsteam Guards, that is. But I had not thought about him in... oh... five years? It did not end well.”

Elizabeth did not wish to pry but could not hide her curiosity.

There was a tightness about Colonel Fitzwilliam's eyes, as if keeping up his usual, resting expression, of genial tolerance, cost him a great deal of effort; the effect was not unlike observing the tension in a rope, as it was used to haul artillery up the side of a cliff. “I do not like to dwell overmuch on it my dear, but there was a reason I was not very surprised when Honoria... reacted, as she did, when I told her I was engaged to you. Captain— Colonel Pascal, rather, had a similar reaction to the mere idea that I would not be unhappy with a wife.”

“You did not say you would trade his friendship for—”

“Oh, no,” said Colonel Fitzwilliam, looking weary in profile, “not at all. I no longer recall how or why it came up— perhaps I was at fault, for admiring a woman in front of him, which, even if it was motivated by aesthetic appreciation rather than anything untoward, I ought not to have done— but we fell to quarreling over my preferences, and he did not believe me when I claimed better self-knowledge. There could be no compromise, and I was....” He forced a smile. “It hurt very badly to realize what I thought was a match was not, and that there was such a fundamental misunderstanding of my character at the heart of it. I like to think I am rather slow to offense or anger, but it when one is hurt, one does not always guard one’s tongue. It was an unpleasant parting.”

Elizabeth put her left hand on his knee.

He absently put his hand over hers. “We apologized via letter, when our tempers had cooled, but neither of us any any inclination to renew the friendship.” He squeezed her hand. “I am sorry, Lizzy, it is not a romantic story, or a pleasant one.”

She tugged on their linked hands, so he would face her, and, releasing his hand, smoothed out the lines of tension about his eyes with her fingertips. He closed his eyes, shoulders sagging a little and said, “Lizzy, my dear, you do not know how happy I was to meet you at Rosings.”

“I have a fair idea,” replied she, “for if you were half as happy as I was, you must have been giddy from morning ‘til night.”

He laughed and leaned into her touch. “My very dear.”

Elizabeth cupped his face and kissed him thoroughly, saying, “Oh Richard, my dear,” softly, reassuringly. “I love you for all you are. Never doubt it.”

He turned from her kiss only to press his cheek to her soulmark, and pull her onto his lap. She had wanted him since the waltz (as she wrote to her father, “Belgian etiquette has contradictions enough to please even you; for only in Brussels is it in every way horrible to go into dinner at the wrong time, but perfectly normal for a dance to consist of couples publicly embracing for a quarter hour”) and a very little insistence on her part overcame his scruples. The demands of the Spanish campaign had caused them to become quick and discreet about their pleasures, and her wants were very soon met.

As much as they talked, and enjoyed talking, Elizabeth had learnt fairly early that there was a tendency amongst all the Fitzwilliams to bury deep— too deep for words— anything of which they were ashamed. These torments, never being spoken aloud, could not be relieved by words, only acts of love. Elizabeth treasured the moments after her reassurances had been felt, until they had sunk into the very marrow of her husband’s bones, the moments of quiet contentment where he leaned his head against her breast, in a state of total (almost unmilitary) relaxation. “My dear,” he said, muffledly, down the bodice of her gown, “have I said recently that I love you?”

She laughingly kissed the top of his head. “Yes, not five minutes ago. Come on, let us not scandalize the driver; we are nearly home.”

He pressed a kiss more-or-less above her heart and released her. “Aye aye, Mrs. Fitzwilliam. I have about ten minutes to gather all together, if I am to meet my officers before they march to Quatre Bras.”

This of course meant that Elizabeth had ten minutes as well, or rather less, for Colonel Dunne was waiting for them by her lodgings.

“Colonel Dunne,” said Colonel Fitzwilliam, unlocking the door. “Come in, I pray you. How d’ye do this evening sir?”

Colonel Dunne was, like them, still in ball dress, and from running his hands through his hair, the short Brutus crop he affected stood on end, making him look more eccentric than usual. “Colonel Fitzwilliam, I come to you in great perplexity. I have some supplies, and my saws and scalpels, but I have no staff. My two assistants were turned off on half-pay in Toulouse last October, after Napoleon seemed to have abdicated, and I have no notion where any of the stewards are. How can I tend to the wounded with no staff?”

“You have Mrs. Fitzwilliam,” said Colonel Fitzwilliam, leading the procession to the bedroom, “if you will forgive my volunteering you, my dear.”

Elizabeth lit a long stick from the fire and went to light the candles on the walls. “I am very happy to be of some use. I am certain I can round up at least half-a-dozen other ladies of the regiment. Where should you like us, sir?”

“We can perhaps pitch a tent as close to the field as we dare,” said Colonel Dunne. “I have a wagon for supplies, but no stretcher-bearers—”

“I shall give an order that any foot soldier of mine whose comrade has fallen must be given immediate leave to escort the injured to the medical tent,” said Colonel Fitzwilliam, removing his dress sword, and searching for accoutrements more useful than ornamental. “Pick the strongest two privates to be your stewards. What else do you need?”

“Linen, as much as can be got. I have... sufficient, I suppose, lint to pack the wounds, but nothing to bind them.”

Elizabeth at once flung open the trunk full of sheets and Holland covers from their Paris lodgings— they had left too quickly to cover any of the furniture— and said, “Well sir, here you are. I hope we will not need all of these, but it is of very good quality.”

Colonel Fitzwilliam added, “I wish you would take those old Spanish shirts, too, Mrs. Fitzwilliam; they do not wear or wash well, and I would much rather see them on my men as bandages than on me as shirts. I’ll keep an eye out for the properest spot for the medical tent, and send an ensign to guide you thither. Mrs. Fitzwilliam, if you will?” He put his pistols on the dressing table, and stuck his head out of the room to call to his batman to go ready the horses.

Elizabeth sat to load Colonel Fitzwilliam’s pistols and tried to sound businesslike as she added, “Colonel Dunne, I ran into an acquaintance of yours, when Colonel Fitzwilliam and I were returning home— a Colonel Pascal? He said he would send some casks of vinegar to you, so that you may wash wounds with it.”

Colonel Dunne, sorting through the linen trunk, made a vague noise of interest and said, “I wonder at his timing; this seems a bad battle for such an experiment. But I suppose I ought to use the vinegar if he has been so good as to send it.”

“Anything extra we can do is, to my mind, a general good,” said Elizabeth. She mechanically loaded the pistols; it was now as automatic a task as setting a seam.

Colonel Fitzwilliam consulted his watch. “Blast. I haven’t the time to change uniforms.”

Elizabeth squinted down the barrel of one of the pistols. “I think most of Brussels faces the same predicament my dear. You shall be the best dressed army in Europe.”

“Let us hope the French think we are too pretty to shoot at,” replied Colonel Fitzwilliam. “Will you help me with my sword?”

It was habit with her to buckle on Colonel Fitzwilliam’s sword herself, as (illogically, she acknowledged), it made her feel as if her last embrace before a battle actually offered some physical protection. She held onto him a moment longer than she usually did and felt him press her to him tightly, before kissing her.

“There now, my dear,” said he, picking up his pistols from the dressing table. “We were surprised, but we are not routed. We shall hold them at Quatre Bras, and, if not, at Waterloo. They shall not reach Belgium, not with Wellington in command. I shall see you very soon.”

Elizabeth was for some time distracted by her duties, for there were many, and they were more complicated than they had ever been before. Of the forty British regiments in Brussels, perhaps half of them had all their medical officers, and the others were in the same circumstances as Colonel Fitzwilliam’s regiment. Her Brussels neighbor, Mrs. Patrick, a wife of an officer in the 28th Foot, told Elizabeth her regiment had only an assistant surgeon for all six hundred men. There were no plans in place, no municipal hospitals, no ambulances. What supplies there were were limited, far more than even the last stages of that Spanish campaign, after the countryside had been picked over by the world’s two largest armies.

“It is a mess,” said Colonel Dunne, as Elizabeth delivered another round of Holland covers ripped into bandages. (The last few ladies she had sent had remained at the main tent, to immediately apply the bandages and sticking plasters they had manufactured.) “Such a mess! I dread to have the other regimental surgeons see me. I have ladies, respectable ladies, wives of officers, attending to men our own general calls the scum of the earth. Some of the men even take their shirts off!”

“We have all followed the drum since Spain, at least,” said Elizabeth. “We have seen considerably worse than men with their shirts off.”

To Elizabeth had fallen the aggravating lot of organizing people, supplies, and influx of soldiers. Though she had never hosted a ball at a great house, Elizabeth fancied it was much the same, if the house was comprised of three tents pelted with rain, the servants had all quit, the orchestra was comprised entirely of canons, bagpipes, fife and drum corps, and a very slightly tone-deaf cavalry trumpeter, and the guests were all bleeding. She spent most of her time running supplies to the main medical tent and the surgery tent, from the tent where the more decorous or more inexperienced ladies were rolling bandages and trying to make up for a lack of apothecary with what skills they had brought from the stillroom.

She was therefore one of the first to hear Colonel Fitzwilliam’s aide-de-camps shouting, “A doctor for the Colonel; he has been shot!”

Elizabeth at once dropped the chair cover she had been picking apart, and raced out of the tent. She was extremely relieved to see Colonel Fitzwilliam looking annoyed and clutching his upper right arm. “Mrs. Fitzwilliam,” said he, spotting her, “covered in mud again, I see.”

“It is my natural state, sir,” she managed to get out.

He cracked a smile. “Do not look quite so frightened; I was incautious enough to be injured, but it is not severe. If Colonel Dunne can dig the bullets out of my arm, I shall be right enough.” Then, seeing she was not satisfied, he sighed and raised his gloved hand, so she could see the injury herself. “As you see: two bullet holes in front, none in the back. It does not hurt enough for the bone to have been hit. It is a very simple injury.”

The only thing that really vexed him was having his wound washed with vinegar. Colonel Dunne did not allow ladies to observe any of his surgeries, but she was allowed in once the swearing had ended, to Colonel Fitzwilliam’s mild dismay.

“You will pretend you heard none of that, I beg you,” he said, looking embarrassed.

“Of course,” said Elizabeth, with an air of great innocence. “I was listening to the artillery and not any of the cursing from the tent. Is all well?”

Colonel Dunne took a critical look at his handiwork. “Well, the day’s business is only just begun; the air cannot be too bad. I do not think there can be much fear of infection.”

One of the privates hastily promoted to a hospital steward came running into the cordoned off section of the tent where the three of them stood. “Sir, Lieutenant Hawkins took a bayonet to a, er....” He glanced at Elizabeth and coughed. “To a, er, delicate place, sir.” He let fall the sheet as Lieutenant Hawkins came waddling by, looking more vexed than gravely injured.

Colonel Dunne sighed. “And now, I must to the next patient.”

“I can clean this part of the tent for you,” offered Elizabeth.

“I am much obliged! So obliged, in fact, that I shall even return the bullets to you.” He gestured at the basin beside him, as he ducked under a hanging sheet to the next patient. “You may have them made into ear-rings, a souvenir of Belgium.”

“I shall cede my part of the spoils,” said Elizabeth.

“Thank you my dear,” said the Colonel. He was bare from the waist up, and Elizabeth was relieved to see no other injuries, but she was concerned enough to check the contents of the basin against coat and shirt. There were two holes unaccounted for in the shirt, which she showed to her husband. It was his best dress shirt, new made, of muslin so finely woven holes that large could not have occurred naturally.

Colonel Fitzwilliam grimaced. “Oh damn it all— beg pardon, Lizzy. I just hate the feel of scalpels.” He raised his voice to the military bellow he reserved for giving orders on the field. “Colonel Dunne, sir!”

“Be with you presently!” he called back. It wore on Colonel Fitzwilliam’s temper to wait, especially when his lieutenant-colonel came back, too injured to ride, but eventually Colonel Dunne returned.

“There is still a bit of muslin in my arm,” said Colonel Fitzwilliam, pulling at the bandage. “Mrs. Fitzwilliam, shew Colonel Dunne the shirt, please?”

She did. Colonel Dunne smacked his forehead with the palm of his hand. “Well damn my eyes! Beg— ”

“To save us all time, I hereby issue a blanket acceptance of all rough language uttered in a medical tent near a field of battle,” said Elizabeth, exiting the tent. She went away to fetch more bandages and returned to see Colonel Dunne comparing some bloody circles of muslin against the shirt.

“I think I have got it all,” Colonel Dunne called over his shoulder to her. “Mrs. Fitzwilliam, if you would please give your expert opinion?” She agreed, and Colonel Dunne set her to bandaging the wound, as there were now ten men waiting to see him, including the lieutenant-colonel.

 

***

 

The day’s business tumbled headlong into the next. Colonel Fitzwilliam's regiment had arrived on the 16th at Quatre Bras, where the fighting had begun the day previous, and been ordered to assist several other batallions in securing the nearby Bossu Woods. This they managed to accomplish, though with more injuries than they would have wished, and with the loss of nearly the entire 69th division and its standard. While in defense of the woods, Colonel Fitzwilliam came across a small cottage, hastily abandoned by its occupants as soon as they had seen the French army advance; this he requisitioned for Colonel Dunne, and the ladies of the regiment, when they were too exhausted to tend to the wounded. Elizabeth had never felt so tired in her life, but still found herself to compelled to remain awake, for lack of sufficient bedrooms, and roll bandages in what passed for the sitting room.

Colonel Fitzwilliam collapsed beside her on the divan and stared up at the ceiling. “I doubt it extremely, but is there any chance an aide-de-campe came looking for me, while I was afield?”

“I am afraid not, by dear,” said Elizabeth, drawing her evening cloak about them both, in lieu of a blanket (for they had none). “Who are you expecting to hear from— Wellington?”

“The Prussians,” said he. “But aye, Wellington, too. We have Quatre Bras secure, but that hardly means anything if the Prussians were not successful at Ligny. Are you still rolling bandages?”

Elizabeth looked down at the cut linen strips in her lap. “No, weaving a basket from linen strips. It will be useful for carrying absolutely nothing. I am very proud of it.”

He cracked a smile and put his arms about her. “Aye, you can sell it to the Quartermaster General. He will love it so much it will become standard issue. Leave off work and sleep a little with me, will you?”

They arranged themselves as best they could, and slept what remained of the night, and, until the rain began, and two of the lieutenants’ wives came rushing into the sitting room in a panic, as the secondary medical tent had been halfway ripped out of the ground by the wind. Elizabeth rose alone, after a brief dispute over whether or not Colonel Fitzwilliam need assist her (she won), and once more committed herself to the cause of getting her petticoats a full twelve inches deep in mud.

It was unfortunately in this state the Wellington saw her, trying to salvage what she could before everything was spoilt by rain.

He tipped his bicorn at her and said, “Unusual eggs you have found, Mrs. Fitzwilliam.”

Elizabeth, clutching a very damp peasant’s straw hat to the top of her head, and hugging an eggbasket full of bandages to her side, replied, “Yes, the byproduct of Holland covers, Your Grace. They shall hatch shortly as bandages.”

“You ferry medical supplies yourself?”

“Only when the regiment’s medical staff has been reduced to Colonel Dunne, and Colonel Dunne alone, sir. One surgeon cannot supply the wants of six hundred men.”

Wellington gestured at one of his aides-de-campe. “Attend Mrs. Fitzwilliam, will you? See to it she gets all this to Colonel Dunne, or onto his medical wagon. I take it Colonel Fitzwilliam is inside?”

Elizabeth directed His Grace to the sitting room, before overloading her helper with baskets and bottles. They had moved nearly everything inside, or on the wagon by the time Wellington came striding out again. She let down her apron and the skirt of her ball gown, to try and hide the worst of the mud as she curtsied, but she was uncertain of her success. Wellington merely quirked his upper lip at her, in his version of a smile, and said, “No need; it is when you are _not_ covered in mud, Mrs. Fitzwilliam, that I am alarmed about the —th Foot,” before bidding her good day and mounting his horse again.

Colonel Fitzwilliam was now awake, and feeling refreshed enough to be sarcastic as he looked at a map he’d spread out over his lap. “What,” he asked, as Elizabeth came back in, futilely shaking the rain off her cloak, “is the point of having allies? They do nothing but make us scramble. The Prussians were defeated at Ligey and are said to be marching to Wavre.”

“Are we retreating?” asked Elizabeth.

“Yes, along the Brussels road to some village called Waterloo that Wellington has had in mind for its hills. People say Wellington is a difficult man to please, but really, all he wants in life are a few hills, and a few competent men to march up and down them.”

“Marching up and down hills seems quite contrary to your usual assignments.”

“Oh no, I am used as I always am: to hold. My regiment is to help hold an estate near the village— Hougoumont, I think it’s called— to defend the right flank of the main force. Just fancy, Lizzy, I am at last master of a grand house and working farm, and lieutenant-colonels of the Coldstream Guards will be taking their orders from me. It is a nice homecoming; I went from Captain to Major in that regiment; it is a very great pleasure to be in command of even four companies of it, if only temporarily.” Colonel Fitzwilliam folded up the map, wincing a little at the movement of his right arm. “Unfortunately, I am stationed there because His Grace thinks any other commander is very likely to be overrun. Your makeshift hospital will have to be closer to Brussels than Hougoumont, my dear. I only hope we can get men to you.”

“So do I. How is your arm today?”

He flexed it, with a slight frown. “Sore, but hardly anything to signify. The bandages still smell so strongly of vinegar I was loathe to touch it, and the air is very bad from yesterday’s battle. I am reluctant to expose the wound to any miasma. I think it will be fine.”

Elizabeth sat by the fire, pulling her gown up a little to try and dry the mud, so that it could be scraped off more easily. “I would feel much better if you had Colonel Dunne examine you again.”

Colonel Fitzwilliam sighed. “Oh really, Lizzy, you make too much of a fuss over it. I have so many orders and letters—”

“Give some of the letters to me then. I must rather insist upon your getting a new bandage at least.”

He submitted to her will grumblingly, as he almost always did. Elizabeth was writing a variation of the same letter to all the Fitzwilliams when Colonel Dunne came in, washed out the wound again with vinegar (Colonel Fitzwilliam limited himself to a hiss of pain rather than the more creative efforts of yesterday), and replaced the bandage. “Healing well,” said Colonel Dunne, stifling a yawn. “Beg pardon, sir. I meant to see you before I slept, but there seemed to be twenty new cases of powder burns in indelicate places.”

“So there was no reason for the wound to be prodded again,” said Colonel Fitzwilliam, very pointedly, to Elizabeth.

Elizabeth could not feel herself to be in the wrong, and so continued serenely on with the letter to Lady Sybil, and said, “Only your wife’s peace of mind. No reason at all.”

Colonel Fitzwilliam sighed and went over to pull on one of her curls. “Oh fine, Mrs. Fitzwilliam. I raise the white flag.” He raised the shirt he held in his left hand, the ‘Bennet’ on his left wrist visible. “Truce?”

“Truce,” she agreed, handing the quill to him. He signed the letter. “There. Thank you Colonel Dunne.”

He bowed, still yawning. “At what o’clock are we to depart, Colonel Fitzwilliam?”

Colonel Fitzwilliam emerged from the neck of his shirt; he tucked it in while saying, “By midday sir, all but the light infantry must be gone. They are acting as decoys long enough that the cavalry may then be brought in, to distract Marshal Ney.”

Colonel Dunne groaned faintly. “And it is already gone ten. I hate to think how long it will take to move the cart through all this mud. By your leave, sir, I— ”

“Oh yes, do not let me keep you. Tell Pattison to have my horse saddled, will you?”

When Colonel Dunne had departed, Elizabeth paused in her letters long enough to help her husband into uniform. It always astonished her how much men had to wear. First the waistcoat went on over the shirt, then the black silk stock over the collar of the shirt, then the uniform coat, then the shoulder belt through the epaulette, then the sash, then the swordbelt.  She rested her head against his chest when doing up this last.

Colonel Fitzwilliam tugged on one of her damp, windblown curls. “Tired already, Mrs. Fitzwilliam?”

“Oh nothing to signify. I could run out onto the field with water and brandy like one of those French _vivandieres_ , if it would not outrage English sensibilities.”

He rested his arms about her. “I half wish I could order you to Brussels. This is a closer-run thing than I like. But— ” kissing her forehead “— if you stay with Colonel Dunne and the other ladies of the regiment, I have no real cause for concern. The French may have their faults, but they have always respected hospitals and injured men. I hope I shall see you soon. Have you a change of clothes?”

“What,” said she, in mock offense. “You dislike my ensemble? The Duke of Wellington himself commented on it.”

“Commented on it, or passed comment on it?”

Elizabeth, hoping to make him laugh, stuck her nose in the air and her hands on her hips. “I shall have you know, sir, this is straight out of _La Belle Assemble._ Battledress: A round-gown of soft white satin with demi train; bosom and sleeves embellished with primrose ribbon; eight to twelve inches of mud on the petticoat, height left to the wearer’s discretion. Brown leather riding boots to be laced tight over white silk stockings. A blood-stained linen apron, drenched evening cloak of dirty primrose satin, and a moulding straw hat is fancifully worn over the whole.”  

Colonel Fitzwilliam laughed and kissed her. “There’s my Lizzy! Ensign Leigh is acting as a courier for me; will you make sure everything’s wrapped in oilskin and taken?”

“You may rely on me.”

“I always do.” He moved to look out the window as he fastened his gorget, and smiled a little at the storm. “Here’s rain enough to pass for England. If you sit by the fire with some needlework, you might even imagine yourself there.”

Elizabeth looked worriedly at him. “Do you think... do you think this is but the start of another long campaign?”

“It may well be,” said he, and coming over, scribbled something on a scrap of paper. “I cannot tell who will win this particular battle, but we have lost battles before, and still won the war.” He folded the scrap, scribbled something else on it, and then put aside the pen to put on his gloves. “I know it is useless to tell you not to be anxious, but I assure you, I have learnt a thing or two about sieges from the Spanish campaign. The French will find it tricky to oust me. I shall send word to you when I can.”

Elizabeth turned her face up for a last kiss, and began sealing all the letters and orders. She came to the scrap Colonel Fitzwilliam had been fiddling with, and found it addressed, ‘Elizabeth Fitzwilliam.’ She opened it to read, with rather too many flourishes, ‘Te amo, my dear Bennet.’

“Ridiculous man,” said she, softly, to herself. But, feeling a little more ridiculous still, she folded it up small and tucked it behind the busk of her stays, so she might keep it with her until her husband’s return.

 

***

 

The rest of the day was devoted to moving, to paying very bewildered Belgian farmers for the use of their buildings, and to what snatches of sleep could be gotten in cramped corners. Elizabeth managed to wash, but not to change her gown, for the only trunk she had taken with her from Brussels was full of linen for bandages. One of the other ladies at least gave her a clean shift to put on, but as she must then put back on a gown and petticoat not satisfactorily cleaned, it did not make her feel very much more refreshed.

Sunday, the 18th of June, was misery of the acutely kind. The heat was oppressive, and the canons close and loud enough to set windows and teeth rattling, and for a choking, acrid fog of cannon smoke to hang over them all. The defense of Hougoumont began sometime mid morning, and the closeness of the action and the numbers and position of the French meant that they did not hear from the company proper until well after the engagement was over. The wounded retreated from the grounds and courtyard not to the distant Colonel Dunne, but instead into the house, where the surgeons of the Coldstream Guard were taxed to their limits.

When they were not busy with men wounded at Quatre Bras and in the retreat to Hougoumont, they tormented themselves by deciphering each trumpeted command and naming each regiment’s fifes, drums, and bagpipes. They knew who had engaged in battle and when, but not where, and not to what effect. By the afternoon, Elizabeth felt stupid with nerves and lack of sleep and was for some time irritable over so late a start to that day’s battle.

“Really?” asked Mrs. Kirke, who paused at four-o’-clock to drink tea and eat plain bread with Elizabeth. Mrs. Kirke’s brother had taken over the farmhouse across from Colonel Dunne and the visit had the absurd air of a village social call. “I am surprised at you, Mrs. Fitz. You are always joking about mud and now you pay no attention to it.”

“What can you mean?”

“Why, Boney is an artillery officer, my dear! Just as Wellington is a cavalryman. Early training always tells. Wellington can maneuver. It is easy to move horses and men in mud. Boney cannot. You cannot move a cannon until the ground has firmed.”

Elizabeth did not respond; soldiers from other regiments, deserters and injured men alike, were now bringing reports that the fighting at Hougoumont had grown so hot the chateau itself was on fire.

Mrs. Kirke was troubled but two hours later was sanguine once again. “The day is not lost quite yet; there are three points of conflict: Hougoumont, La Haie-Sainte, and Le Havre. I have heard nothing of Le Havre, but only La Haie-Sainte has been taken, according to reports I trust. I would weep if your husband was at La Haie-Sainte, but he is not. Hougoumont is still held, even if it is on fire. We would have seen more men fleeing this way if both farms were taken. Stiff upper lip, Mrs. Fitz.”

Elizabeth found this impossible. Of the three points of conflict one had already been won by the French. After so long a war, after so desperate a battle, she did not expect the French to treat any British civilian kindly. The other ladies were equally despondent. When they heard the marching song of Napoleon’s own personal guard, the Old Guard, who had never retreated or been defeated throughout all the years of war, some even fled back to Brussels. Mrs. Kirke blamed them, but Elizabeth could not. Only the obstinate thought that here, at least, she was doing something useful, kept her so close to the battlefield. Her own death had seemed remote and unlikely before; now Elizabeth consoled herself with the thought that for a woman of four-and-twenty, she had no cause to repine never reaching five-and-twenty. She had been happy and had accomplished a great deal.  “See to it,” she wrote to Jane, in a fit of gallows humor, “that they write, ‘HERE LIES ELIZABETH BENNET FITZWILLIAM, AN ACCOMPLISHED WOMAN’ on my tombstone. I do not know if I shall lie under it, but it will comfort me to know I have got the very last word against Miss Bingley.”

Then came to Elizabeth the sweetest music she had ever heard: the very distinctive sound of Prussian regiments on the march.

It gave her much more pleasure to write, “Do not pay the stonemason just yet! My dear, I have never before wept to hear drums, but I can scarcely write I cry from such relief. Napoleon could have defeated Wellington _or_ Blucher, but he cannot defeat both at once! Jane, Waterloo is won!”

Around nine or ten-o-clock, Elizabeth began to see some of their own regiment. The French had spent far too many of their forces at Hougoumont, which refused to fall; upon seeing Napoleon’s Old Guard fleeing from the field, these broken remnants gave up and fled as well. One of the companies, under the command of Colonel Fitzwilliam's most trusted captain, chased after them, and it was the men injured in this action that made it to the hospital.

No one could at first give a full account of Colonel Fitzwilliam, except through his orders to the four companies under his command. Elizabeth was not very worried, particularly as a couple of NCOs and a handful of privates were able to give her an eyewitness account of Colonel Fitzwilliam from about noon. An axe-wielding madman, according to one private, or French sub-lieutenant with an axe, according to his sergeant, managed to cut down the wooden doors of the north gate.

“And now Napoleon sends against us literal gatecrashers,” Colonel Fitzwilliam had apparently said. “These French officers are no gentlemen. Shall we teach them some manners?”

(Another group of privates maintained Colonel Fitzwilliam had said something about barbarians at the gate. Elizabeth was inclined to believe her husband said both of these; they both sounded sarcastic enough to be true.)

Colonel Fitzwilliam and a small party of mostly regular footsoldiers, with three or four officers and NCOs, fought through the melee. Only Colonel Fitzwilliam, and two members of the Coldstream Guard, Lieutenant-Colonel James MacDonald, and corporal James Graham, reached the gate. Colonel Fitzwilliam slammed shut the doors; Corporal Graham lifted and set in place the beam to bar the door; Lieutenant-Colonel MacDonald lead the effort to barricade the gate with flagstones. The French sub-lieutenant, seeing that he and his men were now trapped without hope of escape, had taken his axe to Colonel Fitzwilliam, who had been somehow injured, though it was not clear how, or why, but multiple soldiers assured Elizabeth that he had not injured enough to retire from the field. He had continued to fight until the French company had surrendered, and only then gone indoors to have his wounds dressed, and to see how the southern gate held.

The last anyone had heard, Colonel Fitzwilliam had gotten orders from Wellington himself to hold the chateau at all costs, which lead to the assembled company spending the last part of the battle physically at Hougoumont fighting fire, as much as the French, but no one was entirely sure what had happened to the Colonel once the fire had been doused and the French gone. Later men were equally unable to give their reports. The orders for injured men to find their regimental surgeons had presumably been given by Colonel Fitzwilliam, but had been announced by the captain of each squadron.

Elizabeth’s early ebullience was beginning to fade. As in character it was for Colonel Fitzwilliam to follow his orders to the letter (probably grumbling all the while), his continued absence, especially with a fresh injury, was a source of increasing anxiety. It was only the very real need from the men who returned to them, coughing and blistered from the fire, that kept her from asking any of the uninjured men to accompany her to Hougoumont.

They were in something of a fix; Mrs. Kearney, who was from Canton, and could make remedies when everyone else could not, had made up a number of cold compresses from tea which seemed to do something for the burns, but they had not nearly enough.

Colonel Dunne emerged bloody from his surgery and frightened the men into turning out their pouches, so he might have their tobacco. He instructed Elizabeth to chop and then boil all the tobacco leaves, for use as a poultice, and he surrendeedr his own snuff to Mrs. Beddows, to be mixed into hog fat, as a supplement to Elizabeth’s concoction. While these were being mixed, Elizabeth offered the milk of roses cream she made and used herself, in the desperate idea that that which preserved the fineness of a lady’s complexion might reduce the damage of burns, and Colonel Dunne was desperate enough to accept it. But still the men came, wheezing and blackened with soot, their burns washed in vinegar and scarcely bandaged, bearing increasingly frantic notes dictated by the regimental surgeon of the Coldstream Guards, who was now being forced to take bandages off the dead to be used upon the living. Mrs. MacDougal, the wife of a captain and a rather fearsome Highlander, took charge of this problem, and set off at once, with a band of uninjured privates whom she had terrified into obeying her. She took with her all of Elizabeth’s tobacco leaf poultice, for the ladies had agreed amongst themselves that the men with the worst burns were probably still at Hougoumont.

However, this left them without anything to treat the burn cases that had arrived. They had used up all the tea, tobacco, and hog fat in the farm, and they had emptied the stillroom.

They were at something of a loss until Elizabeth, frustrated, flung open the kitchen windows to look in the garden.

There were long rows of lavender stretching down to the field behind.  

“That is the very thing!” exclaimed Mrs. Brandon, lighting up at once. “I grew up in Derby; we grow a great deal of lavender there. I know of half-a-dozen poultices for burns using lavender.”

Elizabeth knew none of them, so she ceeded the kitchen to Mrs. Brandon and Mrs. Kearney, who were the best apothecaries amongst them, and harvested lavender by lantern light. A sense of unreality came over her. How often had she cut lavender of a June evening with Jane, before bringing it into the Longbourn stillroom? The feeling was so strange, she was obliged to sit for a minute, amongst the cut lavender stalks, and was behindhand in filling up her basket.

The other ladies were already crowded into the kitchen when she was done, so Elizabeth went instead to the stillroom, to transfer the contents of her basket to a place where they would be easily accessible without being in the way.

Elizabeth was still holding both lantern and basket when she heard the distinctive sound of bootheels and spurs against the cobbles of the narrow passage. She kept her back to the door as she set down the lantern on the table. From the way the steps, at first tired-sounding, quickened as they approached the stillroom, she thought that an ensign had been sent to tell her more burned men had arrived.

“I shall only be a moment,” she said, when the footsteps stopped. She did not turn around; she was filling her arms with lavender from the basket.  

“I think,” said a familiar voice, made hoarse from shouting orders all day, “I know better now than to rush you, Mrs. Fitzwilliam.”

Elizabeth clutched the lavender to her breast and turned to see Colonel Fitzwilliam leaning in the doorway. He was clearly exhausted, his gray eyes very pale in a face smudged with soot and gunpowder residue, his best dress uniform absolutely filthy, and his soot-blackened hair plastered flat. Behind him the light from the kitchen glowed, half convincing Elizabeth that in her anxiety, she had summoned an image of her husband burnished bright with longing.

He smiled tiredly. “I don’t know how it is, Lizzy, but just looking at you is like having a homestretch in England.”

“It’s the sight of all the mud and crushed vegetation, I imagine,” said Elizabeth. But she soon overcame her shock and flung herself into her husband’s arms, dropping the lavender so belatedly, she accidentally crushed some between them.

“Oh Lizzy,” said he, with a laugh that turned to a cough, “I am all over powder and dirt, I shall ruin your gown.”

“It is already,” said she, tears stinging her eyes. “Oh Richard— ”

“My dear, my very dear,” said he quietly, kissing her. “It’s alright. It is all done. We won. I nearly took an axe to the ribs, but the actual cut was very shallow and quickly stitched up. I am fine.”

She had been at so high a pitch of tension all day, she could do little but cling about his neck like ivy around a tree, and wash off some of his dirt with her tears. He was always eager for her after a battle and held tightly to her. He asked, “Will you be immediately missed, my dear?” and following her distracted answer that she did not think so, “Does the door lock?”

This she happily agreed to, and as a result, the scent of lavender was enough to make her blush for about a year thereafter. When their need for each other had been at last satisfied, Colonel Fitzwilliam asked, “What’s this?” and pulled the scrap of paper from her stays.

“Your note,” said Elizabeth, with a laugh. “I have no pockets in this gown.”

He leaned his forehead against hers and smiled. “Oh Lizzy.”

She only smiled. “Te amo, my dear Fitzwilliam.”


	2. In which Colonel Fitzwilliam contemplates a career change

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> With thanks to Liz for the ladies of the regiment's reactions to Colonel Fitzwilliam's appearance, and Sunfreckle for the soulmark fairy tales, which can be found here: http://archiveofourown.org/works/9540212/chapters/21572000

They exited the stillroom slowly; Colonel Fitzwilliam because he was really very exhausted, and leaning on Elizabeth for support, and Elizabeth because she knew that as soon as they returned to the kitchen, they would have the difficult task of telling at least some of the women assembled that they were now widows. They paused in the hall, to enjoy the dulcet tones of Mrs. Kearney trying to get someone to stop bothering her. 

“—sent to find Colonel Fitzwilliam?”

“Ayah! Do they not teach you to keep out of the way of people walking with knives in London?”

“I’m from Dublin,” said her outraged interlocutor. “But I was sent by the Duke of Wellington himself to find Colonel Fitzwilliam!”

“How should we know where he is?”

“Then,” persisted the man, “do you know where Mrs. Fitzwilliam is? His Grace told me if I couldn’t find Colonel Fitzwilliam, I should try and find Mrs. Fitzwilliam.”

The ladies of the regiment laughed at this, as did Colonel Fitzwilliam. Elizabeth blushed and asked, “I wonder if Napoleon comments as much on the marriages of his officers.”

“The sign of a good commander is always knowing where his officers are,” rasped Colonel Fitzwilliam, with an air of false innocence, before falling into a coughing fit. “Beg pardon, my dear, but the chateau was on fire most of the day.”

“Let’s get you some tea,” said Elizabeth. It had to be faced. She pushed open the door to the kitchen. Colonel Fitzwilliam tiredly pulled himself off her shoulder and tried to straighten his filthy uniform, without much success, and was very grateful to be steered into a chair by the door. Elizabeth skirted the beautifully dressed aide-de-campe irritating Mrs. Kearney, and pulled one of the kettles off the fire. She poured the hot water over the stewed mint leaves in one of the pots to make something very like, but not exactly tea. This almost enjoyable substance had been fueling them since Mrs. Kearney used up all their supply of actual tea on compresses.

Several of the other ladies smirked in her direction, and Major Lennox’s wife feigned surprise at Colonel Fitzwilliam’s appearance. “Lord, sir!” said she, with exaggerated shock. “We had no idea you were here! None at all.”

“Nor any idea what could be taking Mrs. Fitzwilliam so long in the still room,” said one of the wives of the lieutenants, to a round of rather unladylike smiles and sniggers. “Weren't you just asking what could be taking Mrs. Fitzwilliam so long, Mrs. Brandon?”

Mrs. Brandon turned red and busied herself with the lavender stalks she was mashing to bits. Mrs. Brandon was new to the regiment and hadn't quite realized that the colonel’s first action upon completing some action was to reunite with his wife. The other ladies teased her and Elizabeth about this, in ways subtle and not, until the aide-de-campe was thoroughly flustered. He hadn't understood Wellington’s somewhat roguish order in all its inferences.

Elizabeth could not entirely fight off a blush, but, putting a cup of almost-tea before the sooty but smirking Colonel Fitzwilliam, chided the ladies, “Fie, ladies, fie! We are in the presence of gentlemen! We must now cater to their delicate sensibilities.”

Mrs. Kearney said, sourly, “This new gentleman has been talking at me.”

“What about?” asked Elizabeth.

The aide-de-cape’s face was as red as his uniform, but he brought his heels together with a click, fisted his hands by his side, and announced, “His Grace the Duke of Wellington, Field Marshal of—”

“Yes, we know who sent you,” said Mrs. Kearney, who was not in a forgiving mood. “What message did he send?”

“He bids Colonel Fitzwilliam join him for dinner.”

Colonel Fitzwilliam considered the state of his uniform with considerable dismay. The fabric still smelled burnt, his gold braid was tarnished, his coat and waistcoat rent over his ribs, where some bloodstained muslin could be seen through the flap of of his red coat. His stock and crossbelt were missing— probably gone for bandages or slings— and he had entirely lost his hat. The ends of his red officer’s sash appeared to have, at one point, caught on fire. Only an optimist could have spotted the original white of his knee-breeches, beneath the soot, and the less said of his boots the better.

The aide-de-campe coughed into his fist and said, “His Grace dines with Marshal Blücher at _La Belle Alliance,_ the tavern where General Bonaparte had his headquarters.”

Mrs. Kearney tossed a damp kitchen towel to the colonel. He delicately removed it from where it had landed in his empty teacup, and attempted to wipe off his face and towel off his hair.

Elizabeth laughed. “Oh Good God, I am not sure what sending you looking like this will say about my housewifery.”

“Hopefully it will say enough about my skills as a soldier.” He grinned at her and then, glancing around the kitchen, tore several sheets outs of his memorandum book with a patently false affectation of good cheer.  “I have a list of the dead and wounded at Hougoumont, Lizzy— would you be so good as to take charge of it? I have no idea who Dunne was able to save. ”

Elizabeth promised to do so, and, after having gotten a second list from an exhausted Colonel Dunne, and written out a clean copy, felt all eyes upon her. The ladies of the regiment had kept busy while she was at work, but seeing her put down her pen, paused to look at her with great anxiety. A few ladies had already left the kitchen to tend to their wounded husbands; the ones left had no idea what may or may not have happened to their spouses.

She reached for her cup of not-quite-tea, and felt acutely ashamed of having a living husband, even now dining with the Duke of Wellington, while half the women in the kitchen were now widows, or soon would be. She cleared her throat. “I do not think,” said she, “that there is any easy way to go about this. Would it be a little less hard if I began with the wounded?”

Though Mrs. Kearney was too reserved to generally be a leader of public opinion, in this case, she seemed to speak for all of them when she said, “Yes; it is better that way.”

“There are enlisted men here too— I rely on you to tell the camp followers in your various divisions of their losses, if they are here.” There was a quick pause as everyone searched for something to write with and something else to write on. Elizabeth tried to keep her voice steady, and succeeded through the list of the wounded, but the list of the dead felt a thousand miles long, and one of the ladies in the kitchen went so immediately into hysterics Elizabeth put down the list and would not have continued if the other ladies had not pressed her.

Mrs. Lennox said, in a quivering voice, “Best get it over all at once. Like ripping off a sticking plaster.”

Elizabeth had shakily reached the end of the list when the aide-de-campe returned. He was thoroughly flummoxed to see a kitchen full of crying women, comparing their lists to Elizabeth’s, and discussing whether or not to stay here to continue on the work of burn poultices, or to rush over to Hougoumont at once.

“Er... Mrs. Fitzwilliam?”

Elizabeth looked up from her list, rather annoyed. Could he not see she was busy? Women were always busiest after a battle. There was so much to clean up.

“His Grace the Duke of Wellington invites you to dine with him as well, as he has no hostess.”

Elizabeth’s first impulse was to tell the aide-de-campe that His Grace the Duke of Wellington that he could lump it, but then realized this was probably an invitation meant to compliment Colonel Fitzwilliam. “His Grace is very kind,” said Elizabeth, instead. “He is aware that my husband and I are rather a match in all our dirt?”

Her gown, which at one point had been white satin with yellow trim, was now a tapestry of mud, soot, grass and lavender stains, with a vaguely white splotch in front where she’d been wearing her apron.

The aide-de-campe cleared his throat. “Colonel Fitzwilliam informed him, madame.”

Mrs. Lennox, the next highest ranking woman in the room, said, “Best go, Mrs. Fitzwilliam. I think— I think I can take charge of a party to Hougoumont, if Mrs. Kearney will take charge of the kitchen.”

The other ladies agreed to this scheme, and set about trying to find a way to hide the worst of Elizabeth’s dirt. There was not time enough to really clean her gown, but one of the ladies had changed out of her ball dress for a cambric day gown, and had a mostly clean overdress of Italian crepe still with her. When tied under the bosom with the broad yellow ribbon Elizabeth had been wearing in her hair, it looked almost like an intentional outfit. At the very least, it camouflaged the worst of the stains.

Given the atmosphere of Brussels before Waterloo, Elizabeth was not much surprised to see the continued emphasis on sang-froid, or to see that Wellington thought it right to have a formal dinner party at an inn. What did surprise her was the number of empty places set about the table. Colonel Fitzwilliam gave her a tired nod as she entered, and the few men seated about the table rose. She was the only woman present, a fact which Elizabeth took to mean that the other officers’ wives had either fled to Brussels, or had been more embarrassed about the state of their gowns.  

Elizabeth handed her evening cloak of primrose satin to a servant, and curtsied. “Your Grace.”

“Mrs. Fitzwilliam,” said Wellington. “You are very welcome. Pray, come sit. I was just telling your husband I will recommend him for a knighthood, for his defense of Hougoumont.”

“That is very generous of you, Your Grace,” said Elizabeth, surprised.

“Not in the least,” said he, wryly. “I would have lost the battle if he had not followed my orders so exactly. Boney kept throwing his troops at Colonel Fitzwilliam, instead of the bulk of my army.”

Elizabeth smiled at her husband, and took her seat at the foot of the table.

“That is a pretty dress, Lizzy,” said Colonel Fitzwilliam, a little surprised. “What happened to all your mud?”

“It’s still there, under the overdress,” she admitted.

“Pity I cannot offer you a quick return to the Wash House,” joked Wellington.

Blücher looked politely blank.

An aide-de-campe tried, in a mix of French and German, to explain the complicated joke that Colonel and Mrs. Fitzwilliam were still in the clothes they hard worn to a ball held by the Duchess of Richmond, on a street called the ‘Rue de la Blanchisserie,’ or ‘Laundry Street.’ Wellington had nicknamed the house belonging to the Richmonds ‘Wash House’ as a result. And, as the Fitzwilliams’ ball clothes bore the evidence of three days of pitched battle, they were in need of the laundry.

Blücher smiled, but he clearly thought this was not much of a joke. He changed the subject to the name of the battle. For his part, he liked the idea of naming it ‘The Battle of _La Belle Alliance_ ,’ as would commemorate the multinational force that had defeated Bonaparte. Wellington, replied, somewhat annoyed, that it would not do to name a battle after the loser’s command post. He preferred ‘The Battle of Waterloo.’

None of the others had any opinion, just a mullish determination to back their country’s general, and the conversation became somewhat stilted as a result. It did not help that they were all constantly looking up at noise from the hallway or courtyard, hopeful of some friend joining them, each time they heard the door, but each time, they were disappointed. When they finished dinner, and rose to depart, Elizabeth nearly choked on the air outside the inn. It was thick with gunpowder and already stank of corruption. The moon was full; she could see the piles of infantrymen still in their squares; the ungainly lumps of calvalrymen and horses, streaming down the hill in a final, incomplete charge; the gunners lying like pagan sacrifices about their canons, whose mouths now pointed to the sky in a soundless howl. Dark figures moved about the charnel house before them, occasionally lit by the flare of the torches they carried. Elizabeth thought most of the people before her were probably wives and the stewards of regimental surgeons— or at least, she wished to believe so. She knew that some of them had come not to save the wounded, but to loot the dead.

Colonel Fitzwilliam clasped her hand and said, “Lizzy— try not to look. I have been in the army half my life and I have never seen a battlefield this bad.”

Elizabeth tried to tear her gaze away. “Where’s Hougoumont, Richard?”

He pointed east across the field, where a farmhouse was still smouldering. “That... no, that’s La Haye-Sainte.” He turned her west, at another smoking farmhouse, where parts of the wall still glowed red. “That’s Hougoumont.”

There was something almost pretty about the fires in the distance, and the string of British bivouac fires between them. It reminded Elizabeth slightly of the hideous Fitzwilliam ruby set she had inherited.

“Is anyone from the regiment tending to the wounded there?” asked Colonel Fitzwilliam.

“Yes; half the ladies went, with burn poultices.” She pressed his hand and said, “I rode here. I will go with you wherever you need to go— even Hougoumont.”

He shivered involuntarily and admitted, “There is nothing I would like less than to return to Hougoumont.”

“No one would blame you if you did not,” said Elizabeth.

“No one but myself,” said he. “You do not have to come.” She favored him with a look that said, ‘try and stop me’ and he smiled. “If you have any money, dear, let me have some. I should like to buy brandy and bread here, before going back.”

Elizabeth emptied her purse.

 

***

 

There were two doors to Hougoumont— the northern door to the farm, which was still bolted and still bore axe marks, when they passed it, and the southern door, to the chateau. Though the French had not breached this second set of doors, they had essayed it a great deal, and Elizabeth and Colonel Fitzwilliam had to move slowly, to avoid stepping upon the dead and the wounded. She had thought to equip herself with a perfumed handkerchief when purchasing brandy at the inn, and put this over her mouth and nose, to disguise the worst scents of battle, and to limit the effects of the smoke— the chateau had been burnt to several still smoldering walls and all was still confusion. The wounded were in every room that still remained a room, and several that had neither walls nor roof, merely the suggestion of having once been part of a building.

“You were joking about being a vivandiere, weren’t you?” asked Colonel Fitzwilliam, putting his hands to her waist and swinging her off her horse. “Here’s your chance, my dear. I must go talk to Lieutenant-Colonel MacDonald about the fire.”

Elizabeth had carefully taken off and folded up the overrobe of Italian crepe, and felt a little less foolish, among the injured and dying, to be in a gown that bore witness of her own service. There were four other ladies present, tending to the wounded. Mrs. MacDougal had terrified the other wives into obeying her, and they were moving amongst the lines of burned men, as coordinated as dancers in a set at a ball. Elizabeth followed them, and eventually took over bandaging the burnt, as the youngest lady present was too shocked for any task more complicated than offering round brandy.

She had been but ten minutes at this when Colonel Pascal trudged wearily out of the farmhouse. His hair flopped over his forehead, his apron was unspeakably bloody, and he was rolling down the sleeves of his shirt with a laborious fastidiousness that spoke both of exhaustion and a determination not to let it affect him. Despite herself, and the sheer magnitude of the task before her, Elizabeth could not help but watch him. She was extremely curious; she had liked, but never loved anyone before meeting Colonel Fitzwilliam, and though she did not grudge her husband his past amours, she did not entirely understand them, and indeed, had never thought on them. Elizabeth liked to think on the past as it gave her pleasure, rather than worry, or dwell on unanswered or unanswerable questions.

What might they have in common, Elizabeth wondered, as she slowly wrapped tea-soaked linen about a corporal’s burnt arm. Were there characteristics or philosophies they shared? Was it a habit of action or mind? A part of her realized that she was fixating on this so that she would not have to keep thinking about the overwhelming cost of this day’s victory. She had long since stopped keeping track of the number of wounded, and found herself slipping into a sort of haze while applying poultices to burns, as if to keep the starkness of the reality before her at bay with fuzzy thinking.

Colonel Pascal came over to Mrs. MacDougal and talked quietly with her a moment; Mrs. MacDougal pointed at Elizabeth, to Colonel Pascal’s apparent surprise.

“Mrs. Fitzwilliam,” said Colonel Pascal, coming over to her, much confused. “What are you doing here?”

“Applying cold compresses made from tea,” said Elizabeth. “It is not a standard treatment, I know, but we are out of the tobacco poultice Colonel Dunne sent, and the lavender poultice has yet to arrive.”

“I meant my question more in terms of location than action,” said he, delicately— though Elizabeth already could not imagine him doing anything crudely; even his amputations must be as quick and graceful as a haberdasher cutting silk.

Elizabeth finished with the corporal and left him, pale under his soot, to the lieutenant’s wife with the brandy. She took a moment to try and brush off the new tea and soot stains from her skirt, more to buy time to think than out of any hope of actually moving them. “I have been conscripted, sir, by Colonel Dunne. I used to run the stillroom at my father’s estate and have been drafted as an apothecary.”

“Your husband knows you are here?”

“He brought me.”

Colonel Pascal looked rather alarmed by this. “This is absolutely no place for a lady such as yourself.”

“Probably not,” agreed Elizabeth, with a show of cheer, “but here I am all the same.”

Colonel Pascal persisted, “Madame, this is a very far cry from the Duchess of Richmond’s ballroom.”

Elizabeth looked around, eyebrows raised. “Thank you for pointing that out, sir. I would never have noticed otherwise. I beg you will not make yourself uneasy. I have never seen injuries on quite this scale before, but I am not unfamiliar with the cost of battle. I have followed the drum these three years and more, and I have been assisting Colonel Dunne in his work since then.”

This news startled Colonel Pascal beyond speech.  

“I suppose you thought I was in Brussels with the other British holidayers,” said Elizabeth, not very pleased with this conception of herself.

“I did not make a habit of following Colonel Fitzwilliam’s career,” said Colonel Pascal, a bit stiffly. “But knowing what I did of his... habits, and his family, I do not think this was so unlikely an assumption as you seem to think it.”

“No,” said Elizabeth, “I cannot blame you; I am merely startled to hear myself considered an elegant lady when most of the time I go about with muddy petticoats.”

“You are not at all how I expected you to be,” said Colonel Pascal, after a moment.

Elizabeth replied, “I am glad to hear it. Whenever someone has a preconceived idea of me, I take pleasure in proving them very wrong. But,” she added, beginning to tire of disputing, “what do you most need here?”

“Ice,” said he, with a huff of a laugh. “But where you are to get that in June, I could not tell you.” He turned to go talk to a corporal holding a bone saw.

Elizabeth looked about her and saw a well; she moved to this and essayed the rope. She had never drawn her own water before and was finding it an unpleasant experience. Her bootheels sank into the mud; she strained against the rope. Then she heard faint cries in French from the interior of the well.

Frozen with incredulity, nearly at an angle with the ground in her efforts to haul up the bucket, Elizabeth at first did not notice her husband coming up behind her.

“Don’t bother, my dear,” said Colonel Fitzwilliam, leaning on the edge of the well. “The lid was smashed when the French got through the gate. The water cannot be good.”

“There’s something in the water,” said Elizabeth.

“Soot, I should think,” said Colonel Fitzwilliam, before he heard a faint ‘Au secours!’ from inside the well. He looked down into the well and then suddenly strode off, shouting hoarse orders.

She was happy to give the rope over to some burly privates, and shook out her hands. Colonel Fitzwilliam watched the progress of the rope with a pinched, pained expression. He had a broad streak of soot across one cheek; Elizabeth tried to find a handkerchief to wipe this off, but only came up with a dirty handful of skirt that would only make it worse.

“Lizzy, come away,” said Colonel Fitzwilliam abruptly.

He very seldom ordered her to do anything, and Elizabeth’s first reaction was one of disbelieving indignation. She would stay just to spite him. And really, she did not know what the trouble was; the men had pulled up a shivering French lieutenant, who collapsed onto the ground while still trying to pull out his sword.

Seeing that Elizabeth would not be moved, Colonel Fitzwilliam shot a look of vague irritation in her direction and went over to crouch by the soldier. Colonel Fitzwilliam’s French was good, if noticeably British in his pronunciation of vowels, and his inability to say French ‘r’s correctly. He accepted the lieutenant’s sword and surrender, and then received the alarming news that the well was full of French soldiers.

Were they alive?

The lieutenant replied that some of them were. They had piled the dead below them, to keep from drowning.

Colonel Fitzwilliam called for the surgeon. An ensign returned in a matter of minutes with Colonel Pascal, whose hands were still bloody from his operating table. Colonel Pascal began examining the man, asking questions in French too rapid for Elizabeth to follow, before turning to Colonel Fitzwilliam.

It occurred to Elizabeth that she had never seen her husband and Colonel Pascal together before, and paused, more curious about them than intent on fetching the last of the brandy from her saddlebags. She was struck by how well the two colonels worked together. A phrase or two was enough to give the other some idea of what needed to be done; no sooner had the need been articulated than it had been acted upon.

Had they remained together, Elizabeth thought, feeling tired and out of place, they would have been formidable. Theirs would have been the best run regiment in the army. Colonel Pascal surveyed the scene before him and seemed struck by how Colonel Fitzwilliam favored his right side.

“Did you change your bandage since I put it on?” he asked, accusatorily.

“When would I have had the time?” asked Colonel Fitzwilliam, a little defensively. 

Colonel Pascal leveled an unimpressed look at him. “I am done with amputations for the time being. Let us change the bandage while we still have some.”

“But I—”

Colonel Pascal pointed to an unoccupied bench. A well-trained steward ran over with a lantern and a cask of vinegar, before disappearing into the house for more supplies.

Colonel Fitzwilliam grumbled but gave in.

Satisfied that he would not work himself into exhaustion, Elizabeth went to fetch the last bottle of brandy from her saddlebags and bring it over to the men hauling the surviving French soldiers from the well, and building up a fire to keep them from succumbing to hypothermia. The French greeted her with cries of “c'est une vivandiere anglaise!” and she passed between them and the English soldiers with quiet efficiency, and the mutual thanks of both sets of soldiers. Now the battle was over, the strange camaraderie of the armed service extended past uniform. Everyone was too exhausted to remember they had been trying to kill each other hours before. They shared what they had, helped where they could, and comforted when they could not.

Elizabeth could not understand the colloquial French, full of soldier’s slang, and made further incomprehensible by regional accents, and found herself listening for any French intelligible to her. This was her husband’s, ironically enough; she was so used to him reading her French fairy tales when slightly nauseous (though this was usually from seasickness, not visceral horror from hearing about the men trapped in the well), her ear was tuned to it.

“—not awkward at all!”

“The only one making this awkward is you,” said Colonel Pascal.

“Really,” said Colonel Fitzwilliam, grumpily.

“I am a doctor, you are my patient. There can be no awkwardness or ambiguity. There was not when I stitched up that axe blow to your ribs. Now hold still.”

“No, no, no— you cannot need to wash it out again with vinegar?”

“You are so covered in soot I can’t see anything. If I had water to wash with I would use it, but....”

Elizabeth moved quickly out of the way to avoid some men carrying a wounded drummer boy into the house and missed the next, but when she returned to her duties she heard, “— probably would not have thought to come to Hougoumont, if I had not learnt from your wife you were in command of the —th Foot.”

There was a slight pause; Colonel Fitzwilliam said, in a voice rather taut with pain, “Lizzy said she met you.”

“Yes, in Brussels. And again just now.”

Elizabeth tried not to look as if she was too obviously eavesdropping as she passed the empty brandy bottle to Mr. Hawkins, and crouched by the fire to poke it higher with a stick, but she was desperately curious, and she knew the strain in Colonel Fitzwilliam's voice. Usually the strain would give way to cursing before the pain reached intolerable levels, and it distressed her unbearably to think of being far from him while he was in pain.

Colonel Pascal seemed to recognize it as well, for he prattled on, distractingly, “I really did not know what to expect. I had heard you’d married, and that Mrs. Fitzwilliam was one of Wellington’s flirts, but that brought with it the idea of someone... who would not venture among the wounded less than two hours after a battle. Someone more along the lines of Miss Crawford, not—”

“Not Lizzy,” said Colonel Fitzwilliam, with an indrawn hiss of pain.

“The stinging will stop soon,” said Colonel Pascal. “She is... unique. Gave me a scold when I asked her what she was doing here, at Hougoumont. She seemed utterly unphased by all her dirt. I would never have imagined your wife to be so... unconventional.”

“What did you imagine?” Colonel Fitzwilliam asked, irritably. “I suppose you disbelieved that I could meet a woman who’d be my true match? Did you think I just found some unsuspecting debutante at Almack’s and dragged her about all the battlefields of Europe, to prove some kind of point?”

“Not a debutante,” said Colonel Pascal, appalled. “A society lady.”

Colonel Fitzwilliam swore, but whether this was out of annoyance or pain Elizabeth was not sure. She instead picked up a bit of broken furniture and tossed it into the fire. She began to understand why Darcy was forever poking at fires when he was in some kind of uncomfortable social situation.

“All done,” said Colonel Pascal.

Colonel Fitzwilliam muttered imprecations under his breath.

“A little more gratitude would not go amiss,” said Colonel Pacal, very dry. “You probably would be dead without me.”

This struck her like a sudden blow from a closed fist.

Tears stung at Elizabeth’s eyes. She wanted to pretend it was from the smoke of the fire, but she knew it wasn’t. She was well aware she had overestimated her limits, had put herself into situations to which she was unequal. This was not unfamiliar; the only difference was that she no longer had the strength or the wherewithal to improvise desperately, guided by good manners. The barrier of civility, thin as the first ice over a pond, had shattered; all was swirling confusion and the dreadful, dreadful thought, ‘I was very close to losing my soulmate.''

“I should have listened to you,” said Elizabeth, when Colonel Fitzwilliam came up to her, still pulling on bits of his uniform.

He was alarmed by her tears and said, “Lizzy, my dear, I shouldn’t have snapped at you. My dear, do not— there’s no handkerchief left in this part of Belgium— what can I do? What particularly has overset you?”

“It is only just sunk in,” said Elizabeth, blinking away tears, “how very nearly I lost you.”

Colonel Fitzwilliam pulled her to him; she buried her face in his sooty uniform. The red broadcloth smelled like smoke.

“How can we survive another battle like this?”

“I hope we will never have to again,” said Colonel Fitzwilliam. “The Prussians are in pursuit. We march after them in a few days. I cannot imagine Napoleon’s Army will put up much of a fight.” Then, quieter, “There isn’t enough of it left.”

 

***

 

On the seventh of July, the Anglo-Allied Army rode into Paris, just ahead of King Louis XVIII, a fact that none of Elizabeth’s correspondents quite believed. Elizabeth spent many letters thereafter defending herself, and giving justifications for what seemed an improbable feat. She felt almost as if she protested too much. Paris seemed to her a spiked cannon: its once deadly damages limited, but still capable of a terrible explosion at the first sign of rough handling.

It did not help that Wellington and Blücher’s disagreement about the name of the battle was only a precursor as to their disagreements about everything else. They did not agree on how to follow Napoleon’s army to Paris, or how quickly, nor how to interact with the French populace on the way there. Wellington had learnt from the mistakes Napoleon had made in Spain and was insistent that British troops respect the countries through which they were marching, and that they be severely and publicly punished if they did not. Blücher wanted to blaze a trail of destruction all the way to Paris.

Even if they had not been British, or known Wellington personally, the Fitzwilliams would have been in agreement as to the rightness of Wellington’s perspective. Hougoumont was almost enough to put Elizabeth off soldiering for good; she felt exhausted and ill at ease even weeks afterwards, and fractious any time she smelled smoke. Colonel Fitzwilliam too, seemed a little shaken; he was much more often by her side than even he had been previously, and, when they had arrived in Paris admitted, “Lizzy, I don’t understand why this should be, when I have spent all my adult life in the army, but I cannot quit thinking of Waterloo.”

Elizabeth replied, “Mrs. Kirke’s brother said he thought the death toll to be nearly twenty thousand men.”

“I suppose they do not reckon up the camp followers or civilians?”

“There were few civilians injured, at least.”

Still, the number gave him pause; the lines of tension around eyes and mouth were very marked. Had they not been riding with the rest of the regiment, Elizabeth would have reached out to him. As it was, she said, softly, “Richard, tell me what you are thinking of.”

“In ‘10,” said he, at length, “there were twenty-three thousand British soldiers in the Peninsula. Only three thousand more than the number of men that....”

Elizabeth closed her eyes against a sudden wave of nausea. The enormity of such a loss kept intruding into the ordinary run of life in such alarming ways. Each time it was as if a bandage had fallen off, revealing the unhealed wound beneath.

“How are you today, by the by?” she asked.

“Arm’s a bit stiff, but all’s healing. I’ll show you the scars, if you like.”

She managed a smile. “What a wondrous treat! Can you manage it while still ahorse? You have a second career as a stunt rider at Astley’s Amphitheatre ahead of you.”

“Ha,” he said, a little amused.

“Your nieces and nephews will admire you even more than before.”

“I cannot think your side of the family would greet such a change in career as happily.”

“True, little Jenny is not old enough to appreciate feats of horsemanship, but my father would find it amusing. And, as you have managed to make my mother’s least favorite daughter a lady, she would forgive you anything.”

Colonel Fitzwilliam was still a little bemused to think himself a knight. “Well, we shall have to go to England to achieve that. If you are Lady Fitzwilliam before I am a stunt rider, I daresay your mother will grow tolerably accustomed to it. But there is still Paris to subdue.”

“How bad do you think it will be?” Elizabeth asked.

“I really couldn’t guess,” he said, after a moment’s thought. “I suppose it depends on whether Wellington or Blücher have their way.”

They rode in silence for a few moments, as Elizabeth looked about, recognizing various buildings and monuments she had last seen after Napoleon’s first abdication. “And Napoleon, I suppose,” she said. “Could he break out a third time?”

“I suppose anything is possible, but he has lost even his Old Guard. He could not possibly triumph.”

Elizabeth reserved the right to doubt.

 

***

 

On the 24th of July came the welcome news that Napoleon, who had been captured by the British Navy earlier that week, would not be permitted to land in England, but must sail immediately to St. Helena, a rocky outcropping in the middle of the Atlantic. There could be no hope of escape, or a second return. Every officer’s mess and every general’s dining room was full of champagne and almost unmannerly celebration. Everyone’s relief in Napoleon’s final capture resulted in far too many pre-dinner toasts to every British naval hero since Sir Walter Raleigh, and Elizabeth had to somewhat hastily excuse herself when all the ladies left the gentlemen to port and cigars. She lingered  in the ladies’ retiring room, crushing her curls and feathers against the wall, and not managing to do more than thank the maid who had come to clean up after her.

‘Napoleon is captured,’ Elizabeth thought to herself. ‘This is over. This is all done. I will never see the likes of Hougoumont again.’ She didn’t quite believe herself.

Mrs. Kirke found her in this attitude, and said, “Mrs. Fitz, you well?”

“Too much champagne,” she managed. “And too many fears. Oh Beatrice, I really don’t know what’s come over me.”

Mrs. Kirke took one of the chairs lined up against the wall and said, “There are battles bad enough to shake everyone, my duck. I heard from my brother that Wellington himself wept after Waterloo. And you saw him during the toasts this evening, fighting to look merry as everyone else.”

“Yes, but the Duke Wellington hates to be cheered,” said Elizabeth.

“By the men, but by his officers?” asked Mrs. Kirke. After a moment, Mrs. Kirke added, “I never went to the battlefield of Waterloo. Insufficient bravery.”

“Sufficient sense, more like,” said Elizabeth. “I do not know when I have ever felt so low.”

Mrs. Kirke patted her silk-covered knee. Elizabeth leaned her head against it, and was soothed by Mrs. Kirke’s attempts to fix her headdress. It was extremely nice, thought Elizabeth, to have a friend with whom one could be silent, with whom quietness was not a void but a relaxation.

When Elizabeth felt sober enough to rejoin the others, Mrs. Kirke asked, “Are you quite sure, my dear? One of those Wellesley-Pole nieces of Wellington was threatening to have charades when the gentlemen rejoin us.”

“I happen to like charades and riddles,” said Elizabeth. “If the evening turned musical and someone forced me to play something while the room is still swimming, I should flee like Napoleon, but—”

“There you are,” said Mrs. Kirke, with a final tweak to her headdress. “Now come my dear, let’s go face the others.”

She thought she held up rather well through the rest of the evening, and even solved one of the riddles for her team, but she felt Colonel Fitzwilliam’s somewhat anxious gaze upon her whenever he thought she would not notice, and grew a little self-conscious. Her usual social resources felt low; since Waterloo, she was much quicker with tears or temper, and was more easily tired. After charades ended, the general mood was for discussion; Elizabeth joined a more somber group, talking about Waterloo, and haltingly confessed that she had been so overset by Hougoumont she feared she had done herself some permanent injury. The other officers’ wives entered into her feelings; indeed, almost all of them shared them, though not always about Waterloo, and came up with all sorts of examples of the permanent changes they themselves had experienced from observing scenes too distressing for them to bear. It was not, she thought, that she was cheered by this, but she was relieved by it, and she felt in command of herself enough to smile at being next to Wellington, when the tea and coffee came out, and the groups reformed.

“Very well played game, my lady,” said he. “I am always glad to have you on my side in these sorts of things. It makes a drawing room easier to be in.”

“Oh I am not a lady yet, Your Grace!”

“Ah yes,” he said musingly, stirring his tea. “Back to England you must go— I daresay I can spare you and Colonel Fitzwilliam a fortnight’s leave, if you will wait until this business with Boney’s second exile is resolved.”

“That is—”

“Don't call it generous my dear,” said he, smilingly. “It is the most egregious self-interest. The battle against Boney is done, but the one against Blücher is just starting. I shall need you as much as I need your husband; I know Lady Stornoway was your tutor in politics.”

“We are both happy to be of any service to you, Your Grace,” said Elizabeth, surprised and pleased.

Wellington continued to absent-mindedly stir his tea; he acknowledged her reply with a slight nod but said, abruptly, “An odd thing, Mrs. Fitz, but I would be best pleased to never have to fight another battle in my life, if it could be contrived. Waterloo was....”

“I should hope it was enough of a victory for you,” said Elizabeth, impertinent, but the effort felt forced and her gaiety brittle and unconvincing. She lapsed into accidental seriousness: “Though— no, I quite understand Your Grace. I have not been myself since then, and even Colonel Fitzwilliam’s good humor has been shaken. Such a battle cannot be allowed to happen again.”

“I am glad to hear you enter into my thinking on this.” He tapped his spoon on the side of his cup and said, troubled, “Blücher would raze Paris to the ground in revenge, if he could; so would half the Sixth Coalition. But damme if I haven’t seen in Spain what happens when an occupying force crushes the local populace. We cannot have that.”

“No sir.”

“And,” he said, grimly, “I’ll be damned before I let there be another Waterloo.”

 

***

 

The crossing from France to England was much worse than it usually was; they were delayed a day due to a summer squall and the waves were still horribly choppy. Elizabeth clung to the railing right outside their cabin, hidden from sailors or other passengers, and melodramatically wished for death.

“Come now, my dear,” Colonel Fitzwilliam said, putting a comforting hand to the top of her head. “It’s less than a day. It’ll soon be over. D’you recall sailing from Opporto?”

“Unfortunately,” Elizabeth ground out, between clenched teeth.

He hastily revised his battle plan. "Ah... feeling up to some water yet?”

She shook her head; the ship lurched up through a wave and her stomach seemed to follow it, a few second behind. Colonel Fitzwilliam had to move his hand from her head to the railing, and hold on tightly. Elizabeth was rather amazed she was not sick, and particularly not sick all over him, but she supposed Poseidon was tired of her offerings and did not want another.

“It is not the sign of a well-regulated universe,” said Elizabeth, “that I should so enjoy traveling and yet be so horribly sea-sick.”

“Thank God I taught you to ride, eh?”

“Oh all right,” Elizabeth said, grumpily. “Yes, _thank you sir_ , it was very good of you. Horses are infinitely preferable to ships. But as the wife of a colonel of foot soldiers, I think it is not out of character, or incongruous with my station, to declare that walking is the best possible form of transport. How much longer?”

“We only set sail two hours ago, my dear. We’ve most of the day before us.”

Elizabeth groaned faintly.

“Poor Lizzy,” he send, tugging on a lock of hair more frizz than curl. “Shall I read to you?”

“Please.”

He leaned against the railing, holding on with his left hand, and holding a much battered copy of Perrault’s fairy tales in his right. “Once upon a time there lived a king and queen who were as unhappy in their lot as they were happily matched. Indeed, their unhappiness was greater than words could express, because blessed as their marriage was, it had never been blessed with a child—”

“Hold that thought,” said Elizabeth. Once she had finished, as she euphemistically put it, “giving her offerings to Poseidon,” she said, “Richard— this is probably not the ideal time to ask, but do you still want children soon?”

“Yes.” The answer was automatic and unthinking; he hastily added, “But my dear, do not think I should insist upon it if you do not feel entirely ready. I know it... the timing is never quite ideal. In either thinking of it, or in actuality.”

She leaned her head against the railing again, feeling defeated, and little more than a disgusting mass of fatigue and nausea. “It might be better now than it has been in the past— only... we thought so the first time Napoleon abdicated.”

“Yes. I suppose it was a good thing, in the end, that nothing came of our attempts last year.”

Elizabeth sighed. It hadn’t felt so at the time. It had, in fact, felt particularly unfair that as soon as she actively wished for a child, it seemed impossible to conceive. She had been on the point of taking the waters somewhere, before Napoleon escaped off Elba.

“I could,” said he, after a moment, “sell out. Resign my commission and all.”

Elizabeth raised her head and looked at him in astonishment. “To do... what, Richard? You have been in the army half your life.”

“Longer than that. About a fortnight after I turned sixteen I was given my first pair of colors, and I am four and thirty at the end of August.”

“What would you do?” Elizabeth asked, bewildered.

“I suppose I would not _have_ to sell out. I could try and get a posting at Whitehall, or with the Horse Guards—”

“And sit in an office all day, sorting papers? Oh Richard, you would be miserable.”

“The Foreign Service? They tend to like sending KGBs—” or Knight Commander of the Military Order of the Bath, the rank which he was being awarded “—to various places.”

This actually did seem like a good fit, Elizabeth mulled this over and said, “Well, you have had experience enough with diplomacy at home. If you find you cannot pick up a sword again happily, of course, I — excuse me.” She squeezed her eyes shut through another billow, and cursed at the lurch of the ship and slap of sea spray. “Beg pardon.”

“No need. Damn the sea as much as you like; I have no particular attachment to it.”

“But Richard— please don’t think you need to throw over your career just because it makes it inconvenient to have a child just yet, or rather—” reading in the tension of arm and shoulder braced against the railing and the way he was turned to her, as if checking his instinct to bodily shield her; a protective posture with which she was becoming more and more familiar “—because I have been in a mood since Waterloo.”

“So have I, my dear.”

Elizabeth turned this over in her mind, as much as she could. Sustained concentration was always difficult when every other minute her body not-so-gently reminded her that she had not been designed for sea travel. She managed, “So has Wellington. Richard, I think the nature of warfare was fundamentally altered by Waterloo. Nothing will be the same after it.”

“Hm.”

When she looked up he was looking at Perrault’s _Contes de fee_ , with a searching expression so intent, he seemed to be looking through the very spine of the book for answers.

“Do you believe,” Elizabeth asked presently, “that Wellington will win over Blücher?”

“Yes,” he said, automatically. Colonel Fitzwilliam was not an uncritical man, but when he liked a person, he tended to believe them capable of doing anything they set their mind to.This idea had been bolstered by the fact that he spent most of his life amongst the aristocracy, where money, position, and title generally allowed the men of consequence whom Colonel Fitzwilliam tended to befriend achieve their aims more easily than any other class of person. “I believe in Wellington’s influence at least. And he told you he’d be damned before seeing another Waterloo. I think— I think being in the army will change now that he has defeated Napoleon. Unless Napoleon escapes again, which is always a possibility.”

Elizabeth agreed with this. Even though Napoleon and his entourage had set sail for St. Helena, she would not be easy until the ship carrying Napoleon had departed once again. “If it will change, are you still in a hurry to leave it?”

He shut the book and tucked it into his pocket, so that he could rest his forearms on the railing and stare out at the sea. The line between sea and sky seemed dim that day, giving the impression that they were moving in a gray-blue void. After a moment he said, “I make noises about handing over my commission for the sake of our little family, but in all honesty, Lizzy— Hougoumont follows me wherever I go. I do not think I could survive a battle like that a second time. I am surprised I survived it a first.”

Elizabeth well understood this. 

He tried to smile. "Tough run of luck for you, my dear. You agree to sign on as a soldier's wife, rise magnificently to the occasion, and are denied a further career. Sometimes it does strike me as unfair that a woman must adapt to her husband's profession, instead of being allowed one herself. I half wish the Amazons had triumphed over all the Greek city-states and women were the ones in professions."

"You cannot foist your decision off on me," she said, feeling a little disgruntled. "The Amazons did not conquer the Mediterranean, and in whatever series of Lebnitzian possible worlds we seem to be in— for I cannot call it the best of all possible worlds— you must fight, or write, or make sermons, or sail or what have you."

"Not foisting, my dear; inviting your input. Anything I choose will effect your life as much as my own. Possibly more so."

"I would be more gratified if you asked this at a time where I was not feeling quite so ill," she replied, grumpily.  

"I only admitted to myself I might not like to remain in the Army today," he said, beginning to lose his good humor. "I never looked upon my profession as if I had a choice in the matter; any title I have ever had was something someone saw fit to bestow upon me. Ensign or knight, it never was something I actively sought, or chose."

"Oh yes, a life of wealth and privilege, being pushed towards greater consequence, is very difficult to bear."

"Lizzy."

She groaned and tried to make an effort. "I really don't know what it is you want from me, Richard."

After a moment, he said, in a rather strained tone. "I suppose, my dear, it is to know that I am enough for you; that I am giving you what you wish out of life. All I have actively sought in this life, and been truly satisfied in obtaining, was a family with you."

Elizabeth had not brought up Colonel Pascal since Waterloo, but wondered now, if that had been an error. There were still deep hurts below the surface. She put a hand out to the bit of him she could easily reach, which happened to be the back of his leg. She weakly patted this, and moved to lean her head against the side of his upper leg. “For my part,” she said, making an effort not to snip at him, “I do not think my wishes are very different from any woman of my class and education: a respectable life, with a partner who loves and esteems me, and whom I love and esteem in return. By that metric, I could be happy anywhere with you. Except on a ship. Please do not go into the Navy.”

Colonel Fitzwilliam pulled on her hair affectionately. "That is a promise I can easily make."

"Now," she said, "can we perhaps postpone the rest of this conversation to another time? Poseidon is not finished with me." 


	3. In which things change for the better

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have no idea how knighthoods were actually awarded after Waterloo, so this whole chapter is more ahistoric than the others. Just pretend that the Prince Regent knighted everyone who distinguished themselves at the Battle of Waterloo in London in late August and that the job I invented for Colonel Fitzwilliam actually did exist. Also thanks to Jackal21 for some phrasing about Colonel Fitzwilliam's army experience I borrowed, meri47 for Miss Duncan's backstory, Kiralamouse for an argument I inadvertently stole from one of her reviews and had Elizabeth say to the Earl, and mysunfreckle for the image of Mrs. Bennet driving a carriage through Meryton shouting that her daughter was a lady.

After an evening spent on solid ground, a bath, a good night’s sleep, and an unusual degree of fussing and pampering from Mrs. Pattinson (who was quite delighted at the idea of being a lady’s maid to an actual lady), Elizabeth felt like something approaching human. She was not up to the breakfast delivered to their private parlor but she managed to keep down two cups of tea and almost half a piece of toast.

“You seem to be recovering more quickly than before,” Colonel Fitzwilliam, said encouragingly. “Perhaps we shall make a sailor of you yet.”

Elizabeth leveled an unimpressed look at him and took an unwise bite of toast. It felt heavy and gritty on her tongue, and she had to grimace it down.

Colonel Fitzwilliam hated to be inactive in the face of her distress; they were sitting catty-corner, and he absently reached over to brush some toast crumbs from the corner of her mouth.

Of course, it was on this bit of rather unromantic domesticity that the Earl of Matlock walked in.

The two of them were frozen in their attitudes, Colonel Fitzwilliam in his shirtsleeves, with jam-covered knife in one hand and the other resting where Elizabeth's cheek met her jaw, his thumb still on her lower lip; Elizabeth, toast upraised, feeling aggressively plain in a white-striped muslin gown, old enough that the fabric was beginning to yellow, _sans_ cap, _sans_ jewels, _sans_ tuck or fichu, and _sans_ coat or shawl.

“Sir?” Colonel Fitzwilliam asked, very startled. A second later he realized their informality and he sprang to attention. Elizabeth acted as automatically as if someone had called out to beware of artillery fire; she dropped her toast, rose swiftly to her feet, pulled Colonel Fitzwilliam's coat off the back of his chair and tossed it to her husband. Colonel Fitzwilliam caught it and pulled on the coat, with a slight hiss of pain. The axe blow to his ribs had healed cleanly, but sudden movements pulled on the new-formed scar tissue in a manner that pained him considerably.

The Earl saw this and looked worried; Colonel Fitzwilliam seemed to think this worry had been caused by their deshabille rather than the obvious pain he had been in and said, “I beg your pardon, sir, we were not expecting you. We would have made ourselves ready to receive you, had we known.”

Elizabeth managed to say with tolerable composure, “I was given to understand from Lady Stonroway’s last that the barouche was being sent down to us, that we might not need to hire a carriage, but I— I beg your pardon, sir, from her manner of writing we assumed it would be empty.”

“That was the original intention,” the Earl said, laying down his beaver hat and his Malacca cane upon the end of their table. One of the inn’s servants scurried in to help the Earl out of his light drab traveling coat. “But I thought I might surprise you.”

Elizabeth and Colonel Fitzwilliam exchanged puzzled looks, but thanked him and offered him tea and toast, and sat down again. It felt very awkward. To have been caught so informally by the Earl, who stood always on his dignity and seemed at any moment in time ready to harangue his colleagues in the Lords to do their duty for England, made them both embarrassed. Upon pouring the tea, Elizabeth realized that they had never been alone with the Earl before, just the two of them. There was always some family member to assist, or to act as a buffer.

“We, ah, we are much surprised, sir,” said Colonel Fitzwilliam after a moment. “Can we call up anything else for you?”

The Earl gave them to understand that he had already dined, at the home of a friend of his from university, whose estate was but two miles from Dover. The Earl had spent two nights there, for he had expected the Fitzwilliams yesterday.

“There was a storm over Calais, sir, that kept us from setting out.”

“Yes, the harbormaster mentioned as much.”

Colonel Fitzwilliam was generally quite good at carrying on polite conversation (sometimes despite his interlocutors), but he was so bewildered by the odd appearance of his father a pause fell in the conversation that he could not fill.

Elizabeth tried, “It was very kind of you sir, to come to Dover; we did not expect such a compliment.”

The Earl looked at her and said, smiling, “No, Mrs. Fitzwilliam? When the Duke of Wellington commends my son for gallantry and recommends he be knighted to the Prince Regent?”

Colonel Fitzwilliam colored and said, “It was very gracious of Lord Wellington to do so; I had not expected it in the least.”

“You need not be so self-effacing,” the Earl said, in what was meant to be a teasing tone. “From the accounts I have read, your defense of Hougoumont was an extremely gallant action, and you have fulfilled your duty admirably. I commend you for it.”

Colonel Fitzwilliam was stunned into silence.

Elizabeth could not recall any time where the Earl had ever commended his second son for anything. 

Their shared looks of disbelief and bewilderment were beginning to unsettle His Lordship. 

Elizabeth struggled to adjust her thinking; but she did not often think of the Earl, and when she did, she did not think much of him. He was a man to whom she owed politeness and deference, but little more. The earl’s attempt to bribe her father in the negotiation of her marriage articles, and the level of relief he had displayed introducing her emphatically as his _second son’s true match_ during Elizabeth’s first season in town, had not endeared him to her; his continued reluctance to acknowledge Miss Duncan, in contrast to his enthusiasm in launching Elizabeth into society, had cemented her determination on a cheerful, polite reserve, so she wasted as little energy as possible on a man blind enough not to value her husband.

“That— that is very good of you,” Colonel Fitzwilliam, in a tone of formal politeness, then, perhaps feeling he had not been as expressive as the situation demanded, added a stilted, “Father.”

Another silence. Elizabeth mullishly tried again, to overcome the animosity she felt towards her father-in-law. In Colonel Fitzwilliam’s opinion, the Earl was not a bad man, merely an undemonstrative one who had trouble reconciling any deviation from his expectations; an opinion the colonel had repeated enough times that Elizabeth felt he wished to believe this theory, and did not actually believe it outright.

The Earl realized some response was necessary and said, “Richard, my boy— I hope you realize you are a credit to your profession.” Then, after too long a pause: “And to this family.”

Colonel Fitzwilliam managed a series of polite phrases in a tone of considerable bewilderment, which appeared only to pain the Earl further.

However, Elizabeth had reached the limits of her tolerance. Colonel Fitzwilliam’s theory might well have been correct, but it did not make Elizabeth inclined to make the situation any less awkward; the innumerable slights to her husband and to Honoria now presented themselves like debutants in the Queen’s drawing room and Elizabeth acknowledged them all. She said, frostily, “How very kind, sir. You graciously acknowledge your son is a credit to his family only after he nearly dies, fulfilling the duties of the career you forced him into, and—”

“Lizzy,” Colonel Fitzwilliam said, warningly.

Elizabeth met her husband’s gaze, set her jaw and tried to convey through glaring alone that though _he_ might think this was the best he would ever get, and this the most respect his father would ever accord him, Elizabeth was by no means as satisfied. But then she suddenly felt that it had been unwise to try to finish the whole piece of toast and pressed her napkin to her lips. 

“Are you feeling quite alright Mrs. Fitzwilliam?” the Earl asked stiffly.

The nausea passed and she managed a strained, “I am a poor sailor, my lord. It often lingers long after we have made landfall. I shall go fetch my coat and bonnet so as to keep from delaying you further. Excuse me.”

After ridding herself of the toast and shakily downing a cup of the ginger tea Mrs. Pattinson brewed by the flask before and after water travel, Elizabeth felt prepared to face what would undoubtedly be a very awkward journey from Dover to London. Colonel Fitzwilliam had launched into a rather desperate series of inquiries as to the health and news of every member of his extended family and managed to continue this line of conversation for the rest of the morning. That afternoon, the Earl began pressing for information about Waterloo.

This was done out of a sincere interest, Elizabeth told herself, a desire (for once) to understand Colonel Fitzwilliam and his experiences. But discussion of it was like stepping on a lake not fully frozen and plunging through to the water beneath. Elizabeth and Colonel Fitzwilliam both struggled to speak of it, and the Earl tried (kindly, Elizabeth tried to remind herself), to draw them out upon the subject and press for details.

“An odd notion of kindness,” Elizabeth muttered to herself. Could the Earl not see how much this conversation distressed his son? But evidently not. He pressed as if convinced that Colonel Fitzwilliam’s unwillingness was only a sense of overactive and undesirable modesty, something to to be gotten over by being brisk and manly. Elizabeth had never before been able to entirely picture the Earl’s manner when deciding to send a mortified and ashamed sixteen-year-old Richard Fitzwilliam into the army, to toughen him up. Now it was very clear: the bracing tone full of patriarchal claps on the shoulder, the polite unwillingness to accept any deviation from expectations the Earl had set, the feeling of being overwhelmed by Britishness as if buried under a sudden avalanche of plum puddings.

Colonel Fitzwilliam was accustomed to the overwhelming force of these attacks, but his strength was not up to his usual defense. Elizabeth was surprised to discover the tells she thought obvious— Colonel Fitzwilliam's attempts to change the subject, the increasing pallor of his complexion and increasing visibility of the lines around mouth and eyes, the tension in every line of his body, the restless drumming of his fingers— were not obvious to the Earl. Elizabeth took one of Colonel Fitzwilliam's hands in both of hers and clasped it tightly. His hand still trembled within hers as he talked of the fight to keep shut the gate of Hougoumont, and the axe blow he had taken to the ribs.

Her touch did only limited good; the Earl asked if Colonel Fitzwilliam had lost many men, as one might politely ask after the number of kitchenmaids who needed to be replaced, and the tension snapped, like a cable bearing too large a load. “Too many, sir,” Colonel Fitzwilliam said, looking and sounding as agitated as he obviously felt. “I have never seen death on such a scale. I never wish to again.”

“You aren't talking of selling out?” the Earl demanded, much offended.

“I am considering it,” said Colonel Fitzwilliam, tightly. “Sir, you cannot imagine what it was like—”

“Richard,” said the Earl disapprovingly, “you have been in the army your whole life. Now it has raised you to a title and you wish to leave it?”

Elizabeth felt her dislike returning in force. “My lord,” she said, coolly, “I can conceive of no better time to leave, if so. I am very convinced I would have come to England a widow if it hadn’t been for the regimental surgeon of the Coldstream Guards.” She pressed her lips together and had to stare out the window a moment, until the sudden tears that had sprung to her eyes dried a little.

Colonel Fitzwilliam pressed her hand in thanks.

The Earl attempted to gentle his tone. “Mrs. Fitzwilliam, you are a little overset, no doubt due to the distressing scenes you witnessed—I am sure Lady Stornoway would be happy to have you stay with her in London and at Matlock from now on.”

This offended the feelings of both Elizabeth and the colonel; fortunately the coachman called down that they were arrived in London before Elizabeth lost her temper. As it was, she pushed open the carriage door and hopped down herself, before her husband could hand her out, or the Earl’s footman get down off the back of the coach to lower the steps. Colonel Fitzwilliam was well enough acquainted with her moods to know she needed to walk off her anger, and made a series of vague excuses Elizabeth only half heard.

Elizabeth stalked off to her favorite part of the Matlock gardens, the little wilderness beyond the formal gardens, and tried to exercise herself out of her distemper.

It did not much help; she was easily tired these days and soon collapsed on a bench, feeling utterly fatigued and out of measure furious with the Earl. His kindnesses would increase misery rather than alleviate it, and his praises came too late for her taste; the grief of her friends, many of whom were now widows, had whittled down her fear and anxiety over the injuries of her own husband to a fine, sharp shard that felt lodged under her breastbone. It poked at her in idle moments, reminding her how close she had come to being a widow herself. That anyone could fail to see how close run a thing it was, and just how lucky they were to have Colonel Fitzwilliam alive and well before them offended her deeply.

Elizabeth returned indoors reluctantly. A footman informed her that the Earl and the colonel were in the main drawing room, and she directed her steps thither.

She happened to hear Colonel Fitzwilliam mention her name and, curious, she paused before the side entrance to the main parlor. The door had not been shut all the way; she could hear the conversation between her husband and her father-in-law very clearly.

“—so near the field of battle overset her?” asked the Earl.

“It overset everyone, sir; the Duke of Wellington himself cannot talk about it.”

“Is Mrs. Fitzwilliam’s time at Waterloo behind this talk about selling out?”

“No, sir, rather my own. Mrs. Fitzwilliam is perfectly happy to follow the drum. It is only—” he paused and then said, in a very quiet, serious voice, “I can't describe it. Not to civilians. I cannot even fully describe it to my fellow officers. _Twenty thousand men_ died in the span of three days, sir. _Twenty thousand._ That was more-or-less the size of the English Army in the Peninsula when we first began there. My friend Tilney said that it is half the population of Bath! But for the grace of God, I would have been one of the many dead, and you would have received the Widow Fitzwilliam on her own, three months ago. I had a gunshot wound in the arm at Quatre Bras and an axe blow to the ribs at Hougoumont. Either one of them could very well have carried me off.”

“Apply for medical leave until you are fully recovered, or go on half-pay for a time; I will make up the difference in your income, if you spend the time setting up your nursery. Unless...?”

“I would to God you would stop asking about grandchildren,” Colonel Fitzwilliam said, a real edge of impatience to his tone. “Elizabeth was distressed enough this spring when you went on about how the Duchess of Devonshire managed to conceive a son at Spa. Do you not think she feels the pressure of having no children when nearly all my siblings have begun their families, and her sister Mrs. Bingley has given the Bennets their first grandchild? It is the difficulties of my profession, not any fault of Elizabeth’s, that have caused us to be three years married without children. Sir, why is it—” He cut himself off.

The Earl said, somewhat exasperated, “What, Richard? What would you ask?”

“Why is it, sir,” asked Colonel Fitzwilliam, clearly striving to sound calm and measured, “that you still require proof of my social acceptability?”

“What on earth—”

“You cannot see that I will never be the person you expect me to be. I cannot be other than I am. I cannot change certain facts of life that you find unpalatable.”

“What are you talking of?” the Earl asked, sharply enough that Elizabeth fancied that the whetstone of guilt had been at work.

“I know I have not been the son you wished for, as Honoria has not—”

“That is different,” said the Earl, warningly. “Richard, I am very pleased you married Elizabeth. It is only natural a man should concern himself with his grandchildren.”

“Oh aye, very natural, the production of grandchildren so that a man can be satisfied the army has knocked all the inverted tendencies out of his son as planned. Natural indeed for children to know they were not born out of the deep love their parents had for each other, but the prejudices of their grandparents.”

“Stop all this wild talk,” said the Earl, sounding less commanding than usual.

“Tell me, do your objections to a change in my profession stem from a real concern for me, or the effect my retirement might have on the military superiority of Great Britain... or a concern that I might _revert_ or otherwise embarrass you?”

“It comes out of the very real and _natural_ desire to do what is best for my children! When you are a father yourself you will understand.”

“And so we circle round again.”

“I have lived much longer in the world than you; I know what is required of us, by virtue of the great privileges we enjoy, the position of our family in our society, and the political alliances that have been the work of many generations. I by no means intend to denigrate your wife— indeed, if you thought so, it is as right and natural you should defend her. That was not, however, my intention. True matches are rare even in our rank of life; the felicity of your union with Mrs. Fitzwilliam is everywhere remarked upon—”

“Then for God’s sake stop needling my wife about children, to try and banish any lingering doubt you have that she is not my soulmate. As I am still capable of being pleased with both sexes, and have looked to both for my match, I have searched more than most. I am in a better position than any other man to declare who is and is not my soulmate. Elizabeth _is._ Prod at me all you like, to test and see if I am what you need me to be. I am used to it. But do not take your disappointment out on her. God knows I’ve done little to deserve your censure, but she’s done even less.”

“How can you think I am disappointed?”

“Because, sir,” said Colonel Fitzwilliam, with the sort of eerie calm one saw within the eye of a hurricane, “you always are. My choices will never quite align with yours, and I will never be the person you wish me to be. I have known this for some years; I wish you would acknowledge it as well.”

There fell a somewhat awkward silence. Elizabeth wondered it now she should go in, instead of skulking about in the hall like a badly trained chambermaid. She saw Mrs. Pattinson turning into the hall, and gestured impatiently at her to wait.

The Earl said, “Richard— my boy— it was never my intention....” He cleared his throat. “Perhaps I have not... acted in the ways you... and Honoria... would have wished. But your mother and I— we always acted out of the sincere hope of doing what is best for all our family, and fit you to your proper place in society.”

“What you think is best for us is not necessarily what _is_ , sir,” said Colonel Fitzwilliam, sounding horribly tired. “I know I ask a great deal, in asking you to accept this reality, but it will save us all a great deal of pain and wasted energy if you do.”

There were footsteps; Elizabeth and Mrs. Pattinson hastened to look as if they had only just arrived, and had not managed to achieve this by the time Colonel Fitzwilliam pulled open the door and stalked into the hallway; he spotted Elizabeth, said something vague about needing air himself, and went out into the garden. Elizabeth watched him go, troubled, and avoided looking at the Earl. Mrs. Pattinson, catching the mood of the room, declared that she would have ginger tea waiting Mrs. Fitzwilliam upstairs, and fled.

“How much of that did you and your servant hear, Mrs. Fitzwilliam?” the Earl asked, stiffly.

“Just the end,” she replied, reluctantly; she was on the threshold, very close to following her maid upstairs, and therefore avoiding an argument with her father-in-law.

“Ah,” the Earl said. “I suppose it is a good thing it was your maidservant, merely. She will not talk, I hope.”

“No, sir,” said Elizabeth, longing to go, before she said something she knew in advance she would regret.

The Earl was agitated and uneasy; he had his hands on the back of a chair and gripped it, saying, “I have only ever wanted what is best for my children, as any father does. Richard and Honoria— they have had more troubles than all the others. It is harder for them to be what they must, and so I....”

“I am sure Miss Duncan could take up Honoria’s part with more eloquence, but I can at least tell you that your son is all that he must be and more. Colonel Fitzwilliam is truly the best of men.” Her emotions were too near the surface for any attempt at reserve or self-control to be at all effective. She suddenly burst out, “Why should it matter what his mark says when he is everything that is gentlemanly, kind, and honorable? If it does not matter to _me_ , someone more intimately connected in this business than anyone else, I cannot see why it should matter to _you."_

After a moment, the Earl said, “There are certain expectations we must fulfill, Mrs. Fitzwilliam, given the position of our family in society.”

“And has he not fulfilled them?” asked Elizabeth. “Few men have done as much for Britain as Richard did at Hougoumont; that is why the crown saw fit to give him a knighthood.”

“You do not quite know—”

“I know, _my lord,_ ” said Elizabeth, through clenched teeth, “how to change the bandages Colonel Fitzwilliam only just stopped wearing about his ribs, due to the axe blow he received at Hougoumont. I know every curve of the scar he now bears. I know that he cannot move quickly, still, for when he does, the scar tissue pulls and causes him very great pain. I know from the surgeon of the Coldstream Guards himself, that Colonel Fitzwilliam _would be dead_ if said surgeon had not somewhat arbitrarily decided to go to Hougoumont instead of remaining with the rest of the Coldstream Guard.”

The Earl looked at her a moment and asked, “I am glad to see you your husband’s partisan, madame.”

“What else would I be?” she asked, tartly. “I know all it took for you to agree to the match, sir,  was knowing I was _Miss Bennet,_ but I would never have married anyone I did not believe to be my soulmate.” She turned to leave, but her temper was not yet satisfied. She could not help but add, “I wish you would listen to your son, sir. But if you will not, then I must speak plain soldier: Richard and Honoria may not be the children you wanted, but they are the children you _have_. I would advise you not to let them become the children you _lost.”_

 

***

 

Elizabeth regretted losing her temper almost as soon as she was upstairs, and was, in fact, a little astonished at herself. She knew that thanks to her father’s sense of humor, the money settled upon her and Colonel Fitzwilliam in their marriage articles were generally their own; if she had somehow managed to get them disowned, they would not suffer _much_. At least, not monetarily. And there was always Marjorie— Elizabeth was relatively sure Marjorie could manage to smooth over even her accusing the Earl of treating his least loved children so shabbily the aforementioned children might cast him off. Or so she hoped.

Elizabeth laid back on the bed, pressed her left wrist to her forehead and closed her eyes, intending only to aid her concentration, but when she opened her eyes again, the room was dim and she had a uniform coat spread over her like a blanket. She propped herself up on an elbow, the coat sliding down, and scanned the room. Colonel Fitzwilliam was in his shirtsleeves, in the window seat, a novel angled to the light, and the kitchen cat— who was everywhere _but_ the kitchen when Colonel Fitzwilliam was home—curled up in his lap. He was not so much reading his novel as frowning at it while rubbing the cat’s ear gently between thumb and forefinger.

Elizabeth curled on her side and watched him with drowsy contentment. Though she had what she laughingly categorized as the family weakness for redcoats, and still grew somewhat distracted by the sight of full dress uniform, she very much liked to see her husband in his shirtsleeves, in the quiet, unguarded moments off-duty. She loved him for his good manners, for the instinctive kindness that ill-treatment and the uglier realities of war had never eradicated, for the ease and friendliness he brought to every social situation, but Elizabeth could not help but admit to being particularly enraptured by the emotions her husband thought impolite or difficult to express, all the feelings he shared only with her, and at that, only after a struggle. Colonel Fitzwilliam glanced up, almost absent-mindedly, but seeing her awake, smiled and looked easier. “Awake, _ma belle au bois dormant_? I didn't even need to kiss you.”

She smiled back, and immediately closed her eyes and mumbled something vague about sleeping with her eyes open.

Colonel Fitzwilliam laughed and, cat and book in tow, came to sit on the edge of the bed and kiss her gently.

She made a production of yawning and stretching, saying, exaggeratedly, “Is that you, dear husband? Oh good Sir Knight, your kiss has restored me to—pft!”

In a show of apparent friendless the kitchen cat climbed into Elizabeth's lap and accidentally shoved its tail in her mouth. The experience was unpleasant for woman and cat alike. Colonel Fitzwilliam of course found it hilarious, and, once the cat had abandoned them in a huff, learned forward to kiss Elizabeth on the forehead, and tangle his fingers in the mussed curls at the back of her head. “Have a good nap my dear?”

“I am feeling much better, thank you. I think I will be able to eat something at dinner, unless I have slept through it.”

“My father did not feel up to dining formally this evening; I can ring for a tray whenever you like.”

“I hope I did not keep you from your dinner long.” She was beginning to feel hungry, which was always an encouraging sign that her body had realized she was safe upon dry land once again.

“No, it is only half-past six.” Colonel Fitzwilliam paused and then added, “I have not felt much like eating. How much of the quarrel with my father did you hear?”

“Enough to quarrel with him myself.”

Colonel Fitzwilliam had begun working the pins out of her hair one-handed, something he always insisted he could do, despite years of evidence to the contrary, and frowned a little as he tried to work a pin out of the crushed, tangled curls at the back of her head. “I am very sorry you were swept up into it, Lizzy. He did not—”

“I lost my temper at him about how you and Honoria have been treated. I am afraid to say that the possibility of my scolding him on that head has been very high since our first meeting; the only shock is that I lasted this long without doing it.”

Colonel Fitzwilliam laughed. “Te amo, dear Bennet. You were not distressed by all else you heard?”

“Mm, not as you fear. I... I am distressed at how you have been treated, and a little distressed... that is, I did conceive before....” Elizabeth struggled to express it; she had been more upset by her miscarriage than she generally allowed herself to express, since everyone around her had assured her it was so common a thing, and that she should not worry herself too much about it, and seemed so generally reluctant to discuss it with her. “But we are young, and have not been really trying. Not since March. Indeed, as soon as I can be assured Napoleon will not require a third abdication, I think we should try more seriously for a child.”

Satisfied, Colonel Fitzwilliam shifted so that he sat behind her and could use both hands to pull the pins and combs from her hair. Her hair fell slowly about her shoulders in the usual uneven mess of curls and straight locks and frizz. Colonel Fitzwilliam seemed intent on his task but after a moment said, “I have always felt my luck very keenly in having you for a wife, but I have much more so since Hougoumont.”

She wondered if this was because of Colonel Pascal, or because of how close he had come to dying, or the sheer number of casualties, but dryly said she hoped he felt the same way when they were disinherited.

“It wouldn't come to that,” he replied, attempting to match her tone. “Too much of a scandal.” Elizabeth held out her hand for the pins and hair combs; he deposited them in her palm, and added, “Do not make yourself uneasy, my dear. It will be devilish awkward since I doubt my father will do anything other than pretend today never happened, but we will go back to France soon enough.”

“You are no longer thinking of leaving the army?”

“Not now, at least,” he said, taking his uniform jacket from her lap and shaking it out. Colonel Fitzwilliam got up to hang it across the back of a chair; Elizabeth followed and dropped her hairpins on the top of her vanity, before looping her arms around his waist from behind.

Colonel Fitzwilliam patted her clasped hands. “I am sorry to have so alarmed you earlier, my dear.”

Elizabeth tightened her hold. “Pray do not stop thinking about it merely because it upsets your father and you do not wish for a scene.”

Colonel Fitzwilliam turned, so that she was tucked under his arm. He struggled with himself a moment and said, “I oughtn't to have sprung it on you yesterday, Lizzy. As I proved today, I did not entirely think through what was to be done next, or beyond more than the fact that Waterloo still haunts me. Perhaps the most horrifying scenes of life have been due to the army, but all my successes are due to it as well; I have my duties and responsibilities—”

“And have you not a duty to yourself, to cease any business that causes you grief unnecessarily?”

He looked down at her with exasperated affection. “And yesterday you were so strong in your lack of opinion.”

“Yesterday I was too busy being violently ill over the side of a ship to care,” she replied. “Today I am a little better, if fatigued. I have been very happy to follow the drum, but it is a happiness gained mostly from being your partner.”

“From the company of your friends too, I should think,” he replied, with a loving tug on one of the more intact curls at her temple. “Poor Mrs. Kirke, forgotten as soon as you are no longer in the same country.”

“Ridiculous man,” she said, fondly. “You know I would walk through fire for Beatrice Kirke, but our husbands sharing a profession was but the start of our friendship, not the meat of it. We would be friends no matter our circumstances, just as it is with Mrs. Collins and myself, or Madame de Staëll and myself. I will admit to very much enjoying the greater degree of liberty afforded a military spouse than the mistress of a grand estate, but so long as you still see me as your partner, and not some dependent incapable of reason, as I see so often in other marriages, I can be well contented with my lot.”

“That I can always promise you,” he replied, releasing the curl to touch her cheek. “My dear, my very dear—”

She accepted his kiss but broke off before things could progress further to say, “Let us shelve the discussion for now. Once you are knighted with all the other Waterloo heroes, I am sure more doors will be open to you, and you shall be invited most graciously to walk through all of them. And, any road, I am well enough acquainted with the customs of your family to know it is useless to make any choice of this magnitude without first alerting Marjorie and getting her advice... and Marjorie will not be here until tomorrow.” She put a finger to his lips when he tried to interpret this as an invitation to continue his attentions and raised her eyebrows. “I only meant that I am hungry! For the first time in two days, I think.”

He somewhat exaggerated his shock at this pronouncement until she laughed, gave in, and kissed him again, with a promise of other kisses to come if only he would ring for dinner.

“Very well; I know my duty as a husband is to provide for you. A little gruel, madam?” Elizabeth wrinkled her nose, causing him to chuckle. “I heard some talk of roast mutton, when I went to grant the cat some leave from its usual campaign against the mice in the pantry. Could you manage that?”

She agreed to this, and felt much better for it— though perhaps, she acknowledged to herself, she felt the better for dining alone with her husband, in night rail and dressing gown, her hair loose about her shoulders, than having to suffer through another formal dinner with her husband’s family.

The next morning they remained lazily in bed until Mr. Pattinson informed them that Lord and Lady Stornoway had arrived; they hastily dressed and went downstairs to the excited shrieks of their nieces and nephews and the somewhat frazzled greetings of Lord and Lady Stornoway. Traveling all the way from Hampshire with four children had been a daunting feat, even with a small army of servants to assist them.

“Honoria and Miss Duncan stopped by the docks to welcome Arabella and her husband,” said Stornoway.

“Charming as our children are, I think Honoria and Miss Duncan were tired of them,” said Marjorie dryly, as two nurse maids ushered the two eldest children, Spencer and Julia, upstairs, so they could continue to argue with each other without disturbing the adults. “Three months with four children under the age of ten can be... a trial.”

“Where’s His Lordship, by the by?” Lord Stornoway asked. “Gone to the docks too?”

The Earl, they were informed, had gone for a ride.

“In this heat?” Marjorie asked, rather startled. She glanced around at the assembled company, and, seeing Elizabeth looking guilty and conscious, said, “I really must wash the dust from the road. Mrs. Fitzwilliam, would you be so good as to keep me company?”

“Oh, gladly!”

“I can recognize a brush-off when I hear it,” said Stornoway, slinging an arm about Colonel Fitzwilliam's shoulders. “The secret to marital felicity, little brother, lies in learning to recognize when your wife wants you elsewhere so she can trade confidences with her friends. Shall we to Brook’s?”

The children were shepherded upstairs and Elizabeth soon found herself lolling about on a chaise-longue in Marjorie’s spacious dressing room, sipping tea and wishing she had an appetite for all the sweet meats the cook had sent up. Marjorie, with her hair loosely put up in a gauzy white bandeau, attired in a bathing gown, relaxed in a copper tub lined with a sheet and filled with rose-scented water.

“I wish I could entertain more people in the bath besides family,” said Marjorie, adjusting the folded towel placed between the back of her head and the edge of the tub. “It has such a soothing effect on my temper. I believe Marat entertained all his visitors in the bath; though I do not wish to emulate him in any other respect....”

“Especially being stabbed by a political enemy, I imagine.”

Marjorie opened one eye, looking amused. “Yes, one would wish to avoid that. Well, my dear, why’s our august father-in-law run off?”

Elizabeth set her tea on a side table and leaned back on the chaise, absent-mindedly mirroring Marjorie’s pose, and explained all the events of the day previous. Marjorie listened with her eyebrows steadily rising; when they had reached their zenith, she said, “I always wondered if Richard would ever be pushed past his limit! I am not surprised at the circumstances. I think he would just resign himself to any ill-treatment, but the moment you were threatened, of course he would be up in arms.”

“Richard has always been very obliging, in that respect.”

“I am glad you said something to Lord Matlock about the way he treats Richard and Honoria,” said Marjorie. “It's a problem I have been trying to resolve almost since Stornoway proposed to me, but all I've managed to achieve is a sort of awkward _detente."_  She reached for her cup of tea, and sipping it thoughtfully, said, “My family is I think the problem; Matlock can brush off my objections as just Spencer radicalism... as if we were the Stanhopes or something of the sort!"

“I suppose I am glad we Bennets are not known for anything. But in saying so, I really wonder what influence I have. As His Lordship was so kind as to point out, I haven’t even managed to produce grandchildren yet.”

“Yes, for the inheritance of Earldom is not sufficiently assured by both _his_ two sons, and _my_ two sons! Good God, what medieval notions he has, marriage for procreation only.... But I suppose I am severe on our medieval forebears. Even they understood that marriage is for companionship as much as anything else.” Marjorie out back her empty tea cup on the low table by her tub. “One need not have _influence_ to have _impact._ I was quite pale myself when I received your letter about Hougoumont; I imagine Matlock will be considerably shaken by how close run a thing it was, if he can be brought to understand how bad it was.”

“I cannot agree to that with any real certainty,” replied Elizabeth. “I wrote you a more honest account. I could not really get into Colonel Bénet Pascal’s existence with Lord Matlock.” Elizabeth sat up to drink her own tea. “I... oh it was so odd a thing. Richard has never given me any cause to feel jealous, and all he ever said about Colonel Pascal was about what a terrible parting they had, but....”

“It was a very deep wound,” said Marjorie, musingly. “I remember how hurt Richard was about the whole thing; Lawrence was worried about him for months. But I am curious, Lizzy— you felt jealous?”

“Unworthily so! Seeing the two of them together at Hougoumont— I could see how, in some ways, Colonel Pascal would have been a better match for Richard. He was of so much more use than I was; he saved Richard’s life quite literally, in stitching up an axe wound, and I just....” Elizabeth made an inarticulate noise. “I think myself rather a good military wife, but I felt so _useless_ at Waterloo. The scale of death and injury was beyond anything I can describe. I could do nothing but pass around a brandy bottle.”

“Darling, do not compare your own industry with that of a man’s, especially not one who has been trained to a profession! And pray consider that Richard is no Jacobin. I know— for he told me so— that the social acceptability of your match was a great relief to him. I think he could have battled it out with Colonel Pascal, but it would have worn on him considerably.”

Elizabeth sighed. “What a tangle it all is.”

“Not that much of one,” said Marjorie, reassuringly. “After all, _you_ are the one married to Richard. He chose you. As Voltaire wrote to Emilie du Chatelet, ‘if I was not with you, my dear, I would no doubt be with someone else. But how nice that I have chosen you, and you have chosen me, instead of all those others.’”

“I do not regret my choice,” said Elizabeth, after a moment. “I would not have you believe _that_. I am only a little afraid that my husband will regret _his_... though in saying so, I know it is everything ridiculous. I would sooner doubt in the existence of air than in my husband’s affection for me.”

“It’s a fear I think everyone has,” said Marjorie.

“Even you?”

“Does it surprise you to know it? When Spencer was breech and I was so low and tired as to think I was going to die in childbed having given my husband only a stillborn son, yes, I did wonder if Stornoway would regret his choice... for all his faults, Stornoway is touchingly devoted. He would not marry a second time.”  She sank back in the water with a sigh. “It was a very odd feeling, and I am a little ashamed to admit that it did not last long. Ours is not... an equal match, per se. It is not without its consolations! But everyone— including myself and Stornoway— are well aware that Stornoway gained more by the match than I did. The idea that he had _lost_ something in choosing me....” She raised her wrist and looked at the ‘Stornoway’ curling there, visible through the damp fabric of her bathing gown. “His wrist says Marjorie,” she said, a little absently. “Everyone called me Lady Marjorie when we met; everyone called him Lord Stornoway. Spencer's birth was the one time I wondered if there was a Marjorie wandering about somewhere with a Julian on her wrist.”

“Lord Stornoway made a very wise choice, if so.”

“I fancy he did,” she replied with a laugh, “but here I am, parroting the Fitzwilliam line, when I have known since birth that for Spencer women, their marks are but the name of theirs recorded by future historians.”

There had been noises in Marjorie’s bedroom since Elizabeth had begun her story, Marjorie now called out, sweetly, “Mademoiselle! I appreciate your dispatch, but could you unpack a little more quietly? I am talking with Mrs. Fitzwilliam.”

Instead of Lady Stornoway’s French maid, a rather embarrassed Miss Duncan poked her head through the door.

“I beg yer pardon,” she said, a little gruffly, “I was tryn’ tae make noise enough you would know I was waiting for ye both. Honoria and I are arrived, and Arabella and Mr. Henrikson, and little Freja with us. Nora is with ‘em but I thought I ought to come and say hello to ye both and let ye know we were here.”

Elizabeth blushed, but Marjorie seemed nonplussed.

“Oh, well,” said Marjorie, dismissively, “what we talked of I daresay you already know in part. Dora, I beg you will not mention the existence of Colonel Pascal to our father-in-law, but as you have so far managed to avoid it, I have no real fears on that head. I suppose you heard all of the falling out with the Earl.”

“Aye,” she replied, reddening. Miss Duncan, despite her outdoorsy habits, had an enviously porcelain complexion, a legacy from her Chinese mother; she flushed and burned quite easily. “Mrs. Fitzwilliam, I wish to, er... look, I’m not one for talking about all this. I realized fairly early on that the less I involve myself with Fitzwilliam family squabbles, the better it is for everyone. But I, ah....” She cleared her throat. “I appreciate your taking Matlock to task for how he treats Honoria. And Richard. He doesn’t seem to understand that they are... who they are, and it has been the work of many years to accept themselves... as they are. To deny having been a witness to that journey and that there was even a journey at all has always struck me as a great cruelty, but one I could do anything about, and therefore something I should ignore if I could. But I am glad you essayed it... though I cannae tell what effect it will have.”

Elizabeth listened in increasing astonishment. The few times she had been alone with Miss Duncan, Miss Duncan had hastily gotten out paper and pastels and asked leave to draw her. Elizabeth usually picked up a book and agreed; the miniature Miss Duncan had given her for her twenty-second birthday (a miniature her father kept in his book room at Longbourne) had seemed to Elizabeth the closest thing to approval or friendship she would ever get from Miss Duncan. A whole speech like this had seemed inconceivable even ten minutes ago.

“Thank you,” Elizabeth managed to say. “I hope I did no harm. And I hope... well! I know Honoria does not like me and probably never will, but I do hope she realizes that Richard did not stop being who he is just because he married me, and I happened to be a woman. I know it must not always seem that way, but in essentials, he is unchanged.”

“Aye, and so I’ve told Honoria often enough,” she replied, with a lip quirk of a smile. “But she was badly hurt, and hurt people who cannae bear to acknowledge it are not always capable of addressing the source of their grief. Once Richard was married, she felt she was the odd one out, quite alone amongst all the Fitzwilliams.”

“I did not mean to rob her of an ally,” said Elizabeth.

“And ye didn't. It was only that Richard’s always followed the lead of the stronger personalities about him, and Honoria was hoping to drag him grumbling and protesting into activism. Instead he fell under your spell, and he’s always off engaging in some feat of knight-gallantry abroad with Wellington, if he is not being witty in drawing rooms, or rambling about the countryside.”

Elizabeth’s own eyebrows shot up. It had ever been told her that the man set the tone for the marriage, not the woman. It made her feel rather off balance to discover _anyone_ thought any change in her husband since his marriage had been his response to her personality and expectations, however unconsciously they had been communicated, rather than the natural result of having two people to think of, instead of just one, or the role allotted to a couple rather than a single man, or the course of the wars against Napoleon.

“I assure you,” said Marjorie, frowning a little, “he did all those things before he met Elizabeth. Richard is not like Stornoway— ah.”

She and Elizabeth exchanged speaking glances. Things began to fall neatly into place.

“Honoria fears otherwise,” said Marjorie. “But that is an odd sort of fear. I do think that Richard would ever chose to be with someone who did not accept his inclinations— ah ha, he did choose to do so before, albeit unintentionally... but as it was in the direction Honoria preferred she did not mind. I see.”

Elizabeth was almost offended at this misreading of her husband’s character. “My husband is inclined to smooth over conflict, not to give over to persuasion. Good God, how does Honoria think he commands his men? With such a vacillating character the -th Foot would be in constant mutiny!”

“It isn't that she thinks he follows anyone who wishes him to do something, just that he finds it easier to go along with other people's wishes,” said Miss Duncan, holding up her hands appeasingly. “And of course he'd go along with the wishes of his wife, whatever they might be. All the men in your family do. Stornoway does, and Matlock did, when the Countess was still alive.”

Marjorie said, tartly, “And having seen how well I manage Stornoway, how I have led him quite away from the Countess’s reactionary opinions— how could Honoria think I would allow a match in the family with anyone who was not Whiggish in their notions? How could she think I would befriend anyone with whom I did not agree politically?”

“I realize perhaps meeting me at first she might have some doubts,” said Elizabeth tightly, “but I have been married to Richard three years last April!”

“This is precisely why I don't get involved in family squabbles,” said Miss Duncan, looking harassed. “But I'll say this last: I don't like ye both carrying on as if Honoria’s not to be reasoned with; she softened to ye after you and Marjorie got me included in the family portraits, did she not?”

“I wish,” said Marjorie, annoyed, “that Honoria would realize she did not lose an ally, she _gained another._  I understand the wish to see another same-sex couple at the dinner table, but I couldn't have carried off the family portraits on my own, let alone get the two of you invited to Matlock. Does Honoria not see that _I_ needed an ally too?”

Elizabeth was rather touched by this; but then was surprised to realize there had been any kind of tension between Honoria and Marjorie. Marjorie seemed like the sort of person who never had outright fights with anybody.

Miss Duncan protested, “This isnae something I am keen to keep arguing about.”

Marjorie sat up and pushed a loose tendril of dark brown hair from her eyes. “Hm. Well, we are expected at the modiste’s soon, to pick up our court gowns. Pray do not think,” she added, turning to Miss Duncan, “that we in any way mean or meant to attack you and Honoria.”

“I know,” said Miss Duncan. “But I hate confrontations; I should rather the two of ye worked out your issues with Honoria on your own.”

Elizabeth ventured to ask, “Would you, ah... would you care to come with us to the modiste's, Miss Duncan? I would have asked sooner, but I confess, I thought you preferred the company of Mr. Omai and Mr. Henrikson to myself and Lady Stornoway.”

“That is kind of ye,” said Miss Duncan, a little surprised, “but, ah... perhaps another time. I’ve said my piece and I have had too much of people today. I mean to spend my time sketching roses in the greenhouse before we must have dinner with all your family here too, Mrs. Fitzwilliam.”

“Yes, they can be a sore trial,” agreed Elizabeth. "Especially without my sister Jane traveling with the Darcys, and therefore absent until tomorrow!"

Miss Duncan flushed. “I did no’ mean—”

Elizabeth smiled. “I meant it in all sincerity!”

Miss Duncan ventured to return the smile. “Aye, well. We all have our trials.”

After Marjorie had dressed and they set off for Bond Street, Elizabeth ventured to mention, “I did not know you and Honoria had a falling out over my marrying Richard.”

“Oh, I didn't let it rise to the level of a falling out,” said Marjorie, dismissively. “I saw she was in a sulk and very sweetly reminded her that that time last year the family was preparing to welcome Miss Elliot as Darcy’s bride, and to count her blessings that Richard had chosen someone who was not, in fact, the worst person any of us had ever met.”

“I am unmanned by such praise,” said Elizabeth dryly. She recalled Darcy’s soulmate was married with children and asked, “Who is Miss Elliot? Aside from the worst person you have ever met. Is she now married?”

“Oh, no, she is unmarried. But she is my schoolfriend Anne Elliot’s older sister... and a _Tory.”_

“How dare she,” exclaimed Elizabeth, in mock outrage. “How did any member of the Fitzwilliam family end up linked to a Tory?”

“Darcy gave up looking for his soulmate and _settled_ for the woman closest to his irritatingly high standards,” said Marjorie, looking loftily amused. “Miss Elliot is admittedly one of the most beautiful women I have ever seen, expensively educated and dressed, and in terms of birth and fortune, close on Darcy’s equal. But in terms of _personality_... well! She shared all of his worst personality traits and none of the good. She didn't even make him happy! I drew a contrast between that Elizabeth, whom Honoria herself had called the human embodiment of a sneer, and the sweet, arch, good-natured Elizabeth who so clearly adored Colonel Fitzwilliam, and made him gambol about the house like a gazelle from the Song of Solomon.”

Elizabeth laughed, well pleased with this praise; Marjorie dimpled and said, “You really did make him giddy, my dear; I never saw him as happy as when he came back to London after meeting you. Honoria, I think, would have objected to any woman Richard had an interest in; she argued that everyone was so wild to approve just because you were _Miss Bennet_ — or possibly because you simply weren't _Miss Elliot._ I admit to being offended by the accusation, so I told Honoria that Colonel Fitzwilliam was a grown man and was well capable of determining whether or not he had met his soulmate. If he said he had met his soulmate, then he had. Honoria was rather cool with me as a result, and my befriending you that winter probably did not much help. But really,” said Marjorie, shaking her head, “Honoria is never at Matlock House! If it were not for you and Richard staying with us during the season, I would lock myself in a linen closet every day to scream without the servants hearing me.”

 

***

 

Elizabeth did not see her father-in-law until dinner that evening, and was, for the first few courses, too occupied with other members of her family to pay much attention to him. There were her mother’s raptures to be avoided, Mary’s lectures (now almost interesting) to be endured, Kitty's questions to answer, and, best of all, her father’s conversation to enjoy.

But during the remove, her father, whom Marjorie had kindly seated next to Elizabeth, said, “How very odd indeed.”

“Are you speaking of oddities in the general or the particular, sir?”

“The particular. I could have sworn I saw your august father-in-law talking to Lady Honoria during the last course. I suppose I must have mistaken matters, for he is talking to her now.”

Elizabeth looked down the table at the Earl, who, with painful politesse addressed Honoria exactly once during every single family dinner Elizabeth or her family had ever attended. He and Honoria appeared to be talking, and talking animatedly about something. Stornoway, sitting by his father as always, looked professionally taxidermied, except for the rapid movements of his eyes, as he darted his gaze from father to sister and back again as the conversation demanded. Elizabeth watched long enough to determine that Honoria and the Earl weren’t quarreling, and then looked across the table at her husband.

He met her glance with a droll look, for he was currently bearing the brunt of Mrs. Bennet’s delight at his knighthood; Elizabeth fought a laugh and then looked down the table. Colonel Fitzwilliam followed the line of her gaze and, seeing Honoria and the Earl speaking, looked a little puzzled. Though he could not break entirely from Mrs. Bennet, he kept glancing back, with increasing bewilderment. The Earl and Honoria continued to talk all through dinner.

Then, when Marjorie got up, signaling the ladies to leave, the Earl rose and said, “One moment— I should like, before we all part, to propose a toast.”

The gentlemen all rose; the ladies bent down to pick up their glasses.

“To my son,” said the Earl, raising his glass, “Colonel Richard Fitzwilliam, whose merits have always deserved greater praise than I bestowed. I am very glad to have the chance to recognize him now, and gladder still that, tomorrow, all England shall as well.” He paused, looking straight at his younger son and said, softly, "I am proud of you, Richard."

Colonel Fitzwilliam blushed. 

When in the drawing room, the ladies dispersed. Mary went to the piano; Kitty and Mrs. Bennet poured over the latest copy of _La Belle Assemblee;_  Honoria and Miss Duncan sat a little ways apart, heads close together; and Arabella, who had been nearest the Earl and Honoria at dinner, sat with Elizabeth and Marjorie, saying, “Can you believe that Papa and Honoria spoke of politics all evening?”

“Did they?” asked Marjorie, rather astonished.

“Yes,” said Arabella, beaming. “I always thought it ridiculous Papa set himself against Honoria so, for she’s the most like him. She has such set ideas about people and if people don’t conform to them she gets almost offended, and she’s the only one of us who really _loves_ politics the way Papa does. I mean, yes, Honoria’s ideas of propriety and Papa’s don’t match, and I think Honoria’s lifestyle would really horrify Papa if he knew all of it, the way Papa’s lifestyle horrifies Honoria, but the way they approach the world is very like.”

The gentlemen rejoined them rather quickly. Colonel Fitzwilliam came at once to Elizabeth’s side and bent to kiss her cheek and whisper in her ear, “I think I must be drunk; my father’s being suspiciously attentive.”

Elizabeth turned to look at the Earl once again making efforts with Honoria and, most bewildering of all with _Miss Duncan_ as well. “If you are, so am I. I am seeing the same strange hallucination.”

Marjorie watched this with an expression of barely hidden incredulity; she turned to both of them and said, “Good Lord, you two are wasted in the army, if you could effect so material a change on Lord Matlock. Have you any thought of diplomacy?”

“Vague ones,” said Colonel Fitzwilliam, flicking the tails of his coat out of the way before sitting next to them. “I suppose Lizzy mentioned to you, my thinking of selling out?”

“Yes, and I have been musing on it,” said Marjorie. “Give me a day or two and I shall come up with something suitable; I really do think diplomacy is the way forward for you.” She turned to watch as Honoria got up to get a second cup of coffee, and the Earl and Miss Duncan conversed on their own. All the Fitzwilliam children were speechless at this. In all the years Honoria and Miss Duncan had been together, the Earl had never once attempted to speak to Miss Duncan on her own.

The night was full of shocks; Honoria, having procured a second cup of coffee, came over to Elizabeth and cleared her throat.

“Hello Honoria,” said Colonel Fitzwilliam. “It, ah... it’s been an evening, hasn’t it?”

“Quite.” She struggled with herself and then turned to Elizabeth and said, deliberately, “Elizabeth."

"Yes, your ladyship?" asked Elizabeth, before realizing Honoria had addressed her by her first name, and looking startled.

"Dora told me about your conversation this afternoon and I... well, thank you.”

Colonel Fitzwilliam and Elizabeth both gaped at her.

Marjorie’s eyebrows had migrated to her hairline, but she recovered more quickly and said, “Yes, Richard and Elizabeth were rather effective, weren’t they? They are a very good team.”

Honoria conceded, “Yes, they are very well matched.”

“I, ah, thank you,” Elizabeth managed to get out.

Colonel Fitzwilliam was a little too moved for speech, at least at first. Then he cleared his throat and said, “That means a great deal to me, Honoria. Thank you.”

“I ought to have said it years ago,” she replied, with a reluctant smile.

“Why... did you now?” Elizabeth asked, a little bewildered.

“Oh,” said Honoria, with a cheeky grin, “I couldn’t bear to be less shocking than my  _father_."

 

***

 

A little to Elizabeth’s surprise, she woke the next morning tired and nauseous. She could not pay much attention to the ceremony which transformed Colonel Richard Fitzwilliam into a Colonel Sir Richard Fitzwilliam, KGB, and a mere Lizzy Bennet into so august a figure as a Lady Fitzwilliam, but she had her mother to remind her of every detail, and to lavishly embroider it with the probable reactions of everyone Mrs. Bennet had ever seen in her life.

“If only my own mother were here to see it,” Mrs. Bennet said, as Elizabeth waited for Mrs. Pattinson to undo one of the impossible knots holding her court hoops on. “My Mama was so elated when I married your father! Why, my own father admitted I was fully four or five thousand pounds short of having any claim to such a match. And you, my dear— why I never thought in all my life to call you a lady!”

“Thank you, Mama,” she said, through clenched teeth.

“Jane, I thought, might have managed it. So beautiful and so sweet tempered as she always was. But you, Lizzy! We permitted you to run on in such a wild way at home because the unlikelihood of your finding your soulmate, I was so greatly afeared that you would never marry at all. How I regret lamenting so over your mark when you turned sixteen! Your soulmate is such a fine man, so gentleman-like, so amiable... and a knight! I should have seen the mark of nobility my dear, for surely that is what it was. Oh fancy, my daughter _Lady Fitzwilliam_!”

Elizabeth, freed from her hoops, rushed to the chamber pot and was sick.

“ _Well_ now,” said Mrs. Bennet tartly. “No need for all this drama Miss Lizzy! If you are tired of my celebrating your good fortune— which you have done nothing to deserve— you have only to say so.”

Mrs. Pattinson helpfully came over with a glass of water. Elizabeth rinsed out her mouth, feeling miserable. “Oh God, Mama, this would be going rather far for a joke.”

“What, are you actually ill?” her mother asked, alarmed.

“Lady Fitzwilliam has been a little unwell since Waterloo, Madame,” said Mrs. Pattinson, as snootily as any French lady’s maid. She knelt behind Elizabeth, who felt too defeated to stand up again, and began loosening her stays. “She and the other ladies of the regiment was helping the regimental surgeon, mum, when the other fine ladies was all fleeing from Brussels in a panic.”

“Mrs. Pattinson is too kind,” said Elizabeth, slowly sipping the rest of the water. “She and the other wives of enlisted men were closer to the field. They were bringing in the wounded. Really, I am a weak creature to have been so affected.”

Mrs. Pattinson said, indulgently, “But none of us were ladies, Madame; we none of us have gentlemen for fathers, or earls for father-in-laws. We have seen much worse than battlefields. I don't think you had ever even seen a dead body before the colonel brought you to Spain. Arms up my lady, let’s get you into your dressing gown.”

“Indeed not,” said Mrs. Bennet, scandalized. “Your mistress never even seen the inside of a kitchen. She would never have seen a dead body, I can assure you of that! All my daughters were brought up to be very genteel.”

“Lady Fitzwilliam is very fine,” said Mrs. Pattinson, contentedly. She draped a red silk dressing gown about Elizabeth's shoulders. “There now, my lady. A little rest before dinner will do you some good. None of the household expects you to be out of bed at present.”

“They do not?” Mrs. Bennet asked, a little disappointed. She had wanted to gloat about Elizabeth's being Lady Fitzwilliam. “They receive no visitors today?”

“They do, Madame, but Mademoiselle, Lady Stonroway’s maid, told me that Lady Stonroway always says Mrs. Fitzwilliam— beg pardon, _Lady_ Fitzwilliam is not at home the first few days after she is come back from campaign.” Mrs. Pattinson finished turning down the bed clothes and then disappeared with the chamber pot through the servants’ door.

“It always takes me a long time to recover from sea-sickness,” said Elizabeth, climbing wearily into bed.

Mrs. Bennet frowned. “ _How_ long have you been ill, Lizzy?”

“Oh, I am always seasick. I have been since the very first time I set foot on a ship.”

“No, just generally feeling low and ill, and a little nauseous?”

“The fifteenth of June,” she replied, pointedly.

“Do you still get your monthlies the third week of the month? You always used to be right after Jane. Though —”

“Not after Waterloo,” she said, irritably. “Mama, why are we talking of this? You know whenever I am under particular strain I am not regular—”

“But have you had them since May?” asked Mrs. Bennet, looking arch. Elizabeth suddenly realized that she hadn’t.

“Tell me, my dear—have your gowns been feeling a little too tight, especially in the bust? Have you been needing a nap every day?”

Elizabeth grudgingly assented to both, to her mother’s evident delight. “I wish you would celebrate a little less visibly at my misery.”

“Misery! Oh and your father calls you the cleverest of his daughters.”

“Mama—”

“Oh Lizzy,” she said, clucking her tongue. “Is it not obvious? Three months late, feeling tired, ill, and low, and your figure changing? What else can it be? You are increasing.”

It was fairly obvious, now that Mrs. Bennet had mentioned it. Elizabeth felt stupid, and then she felt incredibly annoyed with herself.

“Well now, isn’t this good news!” Mrs. Bennet exclaimed, reaching out to pat Elizabeth’s sleeve. She looked very smug. This was never a good thing, in Elizabeth’s experience. “I shall ask for a doctor to be sent for— no an _accoucheur!_ A Lady Fitzwilliam must be attended by an _accoucheur!_ ” Poor Mrs. Pattinson, who had just come in with the cup of ginger tea that helped Elizabeth endure what was apparently morning sickness, was immediately dispatched to find the elegant lady who waited upon Lady Stornoway, to demand the name of Lady Stornoway’s _accoucheur_ and to thence set out at once to procure the services of this gentleman.

Elizabeth personally longed for the sweet embrace of death more than any member of the medical profession. Not only did she feel maudlin and nauseous but her mother now had two subjects on which to prattle endlessly and incoherently. Mrs. Bennet had never before been so pleased with her second eldest— never before had she _two_ causes to rejoice. A title and a child! A woman could not hope to accomplish more in life.

The vague protest Elizabeth made at this assertion was summarily waved away. “Don't let me hear you've turned Jacobin, Miss Lizzy, not with your being a favorite of the Duke of Wellington, and your now being a _lady._ You just endeavor to act like a lady. Oh my daughter a _lady!_ I told Lady Lucas as soon as your papa read your letter at table that morning. She came to visit wishing to share the newspaper saying that there had been a great victory at Waterloo, but I was able to tell her all about the battle, and Sir Richard’s part in it. By the by, _Lady Fitzwilliam,_ the royal mail is in really a shocking state. The letter you send your father came so terribly dirty! There were great smudges of soot all over it. But I told Lady Lucas all about it, and then, you know, Mrs. Long and her two nieces came to visit, so the letter had to be read again.”

“Just how many times did you read my letter to all of Meryton?” Elizabeth groused.

“All of Meryton— why, that morning I had only three visits, not including your Aunt Phillips. The Gouldings, of course, came by, for they do not have a paper delivered, and Sir William Lucas always has the _Times,_ so as to hear about the court at St. James. It is so much better to get the news from someone one _knows,_  rather than some indifferent newspaper man who probably was not even there. And there was no mention of the Duke of Wellington commending Sir Richard, or recommending him for a knighthood until the twenty-third of June! Not a word about him, except that at Hougoumont the commanding officer was the Honorable Colonel Fitzwilliam, of the —th Foot, supported by the Coldstream Guards. But to return—”

“Mama,” said Elizabeth, “I do _not_ want to return to this particular subject. I am sure all Meryton can recite with you His Grace’s commendation of Sir Richard’s actions.” She had a sudden, horrible image of her mother hanging out of the family carriage as it rolled through Meryton, shouting at any and all acquaintances, “Have you heard that my daughter is to be a lady?”

Thankfully a midwife (rather than an accoucheur, a sort of male midwife whose value came more from being fashionable than being skillful) came in, followed swiftly by Marjorie, who, having been alerted by her own maid, was naturally quite curious as to what chaos Mrs. Bennet was once again bringing into the tranquil, stately halls of Matlock House. Mrs. Bennet's repeating the dull story of what newspapers were delivered to Meryton to Marjorie at least allowed Elizabeth to have a very discreet examination by the midwife, followed by some questions about dates.

The midwife darted a quick look at Mrs. Bennet, loud in her exclamations of joy over the ceremony, and leaned towards Elizabeth, whispering, “It is early days yet, my lady, is your desire...?”

“For a child,” said Elizabeth, pleased to be asked. “I have been trying for one for some time.”

“Then,” said the midwife, smiling at her, “I am pleased to reassure you that you are nine weeks with child. I daresay you shall feel it quickening within the month.”

As Mrs. Bennet was busy going over everyone’s court gowns with Marjorie (who had entered into this topic with a relief that revealed a very real fear of being forced to converse on more disagreeable topics), Elizabeth had a moment of private and profound relief. Though she did not regret the years where she had only herself and her husband to please, she was glad not to have to go through the desperate round of hope and disappointment she had endured the first time she had lived in Paris and been trying for a child. And, too, Elizabeth had begun to feel— perhaps pettily— left behind by all her immediate peers. Charlotte’s daughter could now speak a little (though she made about as much sense as her father). Jane had quickly and dutifully presented Mr. Bingley with a daughter, and little Jane (called Jenny) was stout, good-natured creature, who slept through the nights and only vomited on her nursemaids, instead of doting parents or relations. Lady Stornoway had presented her lord with his fourth child, Lady Arabella’s daughter was now two, and Lady Sybil had written in her last letter that she would not be visiting this year, as she was expecting a child in August. It was perhaps stupid to feel resentful about the successes of others, when there was so little wanting in her own life, but each time she had held little Jenny last spring, it was with a stab of deeply concealed envy.

“Where is your husband, madame?”

“At Brook’s, with his brother and cousin,” she replied. "And several other Waterloo KGBs, I daresay."

“Ah,” said the midwife. “So you are left to your mother, eh?”

“Unfortunately.”

The midwife grinned. “I think you need bed rest for now, my lady. That is my professional opinion on the subject. I shall take your mother out to the dressing room and tell her the good news, shall I?”

Elizabeth thought she would be too excited to really rest, but as soon as she sank, smiling, into the pillows, she slept until it was time to dress for the ball the Prince Regent had been glad to have an excuse to throw.

Sir Richard entered as Mrs. Pattinson departed, looking just as resplendent as he had that morning, in full dress uniform, all over stars and medals. She rose to greet him, feeling suddenly elated to have him back again. “Lucky man, your court dress is sensible enough to be worn to dinner!”

“I am very grateful hoops went out of style,” said he, putting an arm around her waist. “I cannot think how men at the court of Louis XIV embraced their wives.”

“I do not think that was something they greatly desired to do,” replied she, dryly. Still Elizabeth put her arms about his neck and kissed him. He was as gentle and sweet to her as ever, and stroked her cheek with the back of his fingers when they had done, his expression open and soft.

“How was Brook’s?” she asked, before her toilette could be further delayed. 

“Extremely useful.” He looked down at her a moment and said, “I’ve been offered something I think will please you. Now, it does mean I cannot sell out.”

“No?”

“No,” Sir Richard said, smiling at her. “I’ve been asked if I should like to be the military attaché to the British Embassy in France.”

“What?” asked Elizabeth, a little startled. “Marjorie cannot have—”

“Surprisingly, this does not come from Marjorie, or my father,” he said, tapping the tip of her nose. “The offer comes thanks to a friendship I formed in my bachelor days, with Lord Pumphrey. He’s a sort of clean-up man for the Foreign Office. We were chatting about Paris back in ‘14— and actually, after I mentioned what a favorite you were in Madame de Staëll’s salon, he very carefully brought up the fact that Lord Greville, our Ambassador to Paris, has been extremely nervous in his post. It may shock you to hear it, but the people of Paris have not been terrifically happy to have British politicians running about unchecked.”

“You astonish me.”

Sir Richard grinned. “The fact of the matter is that Greville has been begging the Foreign Office for a greater security detachment... and at the same time, Wellington pesters them constantly about his particular agenda. Hearing I was hoping to get out of active duty, Pumphrey suggested I might be just the person to solve these two rather pressing problems of his.”

“And what does being a military attaché entail?”

“Living in Paris; liaising with Wellington, who will be in Cambrai with the army proper; arranging and training guards for the Grevilles and the rest of the embassy staff; providing Greville with any information he requires about the British Army; convincing French high society we redcoats are no longer the enemy. I daresay I may have to frighten off a Bonapartist or two by having some men shoot into the air, but I shall not see active combat.”

“I hope you took the offer!”

“I said I would have to consult with you. Pumphrey said he hoped I would; he needed you at Madame de Staëll’s almost more than he needed me at the Embassy.”

“What does my friendship with Madame de Stael had to do with this offer?”

“Have you not heard that there are three great powers in Europe— England, Russia, and Madame de Staëll?”

Elizabeth stared at him a moment and then began to laugh. “Ah, so I am Ambassadress to the kingdom of Madame de Staëll! I see.”

“Indeed so, Lady Fitzwilliam,” said Sir Richard, kissing her in the middle of a laugh. “Lord Pumphrey will be at the ball tonight; we can accept his kind offer then.” He stepped back and looked at her ball gown admiringly. “I like this color. Sort of a bronzey green. What are you wearing with it?”

“My wedding diamonds, I thought?” she said, beginning to feel suspicious. Sure enough, he released her and produced from the pocket of his coat a velvet box. “Richard, you didn’t— when did you have the time to go to a jeweler's?”

“Darling, do not accuse me of squandering my time,” he said, with a look of wounded innocence, “I wrote ahead.”

“The expense—”

“Come now, Lizzy, oblige me. It is not every day I have a _lady_ on my arm."

“Oh yes, up until now I have been merely a hoyden clinging onto your coattails,” she replied, dryly.  

Sir Richard wound one of her curls around his index finger said, “Really, my dear, I must be the only man in London who surprises his wife with new jewellery and gets scolded for it. Will you not let me commemorate this in my own fashion?” He studied the curl about his finger and said, “I like to see you wearing the jewels I get you to mark special occasions. Whenever I see your diamonds, for example, I am reminded very pleasantly of our wedding night. It is a memory that has sustained me through many a trying evening.”

“The same day I am made a lady, you are made a scoundrel,” she said, in a tone of mock indignation. “Very well, let me see how you will store the memory of the day you were knighted.”

Sir Richard tugged on her curl and released it. “Your noble sacrifice does not go unappreciated. Here you are.”

It was, admittedly, a very pretty emerald set, and it brought out the hazel color of her eyes magnificently. Elizabeth protested less than she felt she ought, and after grumbling a little longer over the expense of this, admitted that her husband might be a spendthrift, but one with magnificent taste.

“I thought you might be persuaded,” he said, smiling. “Te amo, my dear lady.” Sir Richard gently stroked her cheek down to her neck, and let his fingers rest on one of the gold settings of the stones in her necklace.

Elizabeth glanced at the clock, lips twitching. “Oh, all right! I have never admitted a knight to my bed before. The prospect is an exciting one. But we only have a quarter of an hour before we are expected downstairs, and if I muss my hair again, Mrs. Pattinson will never forgive me.”

Sir Richard acted with such admirable dispatch they were both satisfied with enough time to repair the effects of passion to their hair and clothing, and for Elizabeth to present him with the new swordbelt she’d had commissioned for him.

“Not nearly as nice as the emeralds,” she said, smiling at him, “but at least practical.”

“I have always enjoyed your habit of helping me with my sword before a battle,” he said, as she reached her arms about him. “It is sentimental, I know, but it always feels as if...." 

It was too embarrassing to speak aloud her feeling that in doing so she ensured he carried her embrace with her; his hint that he understood her motive was enough. She flushed and said, “Sir, I have a second surprise for you, which I think will please you far more.”

Sir Richard looked faintly puzzled. “Really? Don't spend your pin money on me my dear. I can take care of my wardrobe on my own.”

Elizabeth looked up and said, “At some point you will have to forgive me for buying insufficiently fine muslin _once_ , not two months into our marriage! But, it is not something you can wear.”

He glanced at the clock and decided they hadn’t the time for a guessing game. “Give me a hint, will you?”

“It is a surprise that I will not be able to fully present to you until March.”

He had automatically looped his arms about her waist; they tightened and he looked at her with startled incomprehension, tinged with a hope that seemed, as yet, felt rather consciously understood.

“It appears,” said Elizabeth, raising her eyebrows, and fighting a smile, “I have a little souvenir from Belgium. While you were at Brook’s, I made the acquaintance of Lady Stornoway’s midwife. I am nine weeks along, and the midwife thinks it very likely I shall carry to term.”

His joy was beyond expression.


	4. In which Sir Richard and Lady Fitzwilliam live in interesting times

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I’ve taken yet more historical liberties. The event with Wellington that Lizzy witnesses actually took place in 1818, and was even less dramatic than here.
> 
> This was initially one chapter but grew way too long. The next half will be up in a day or two.

The next morning (though to call it morning was to have a very questionable understanding of how time operated, as Mr. Bennet pointed out, when he saw them leaving), Sir Richard and Lady Fitzwilliam escaped the almost overwhelming congratulations of Matlock House to walk the few blocks to Darcy House. Elizabeth was in an ebullient mood, and Sir Richard scarcely less. The weather matched their spirits. It was bright and sunny and very nearly warm.

No sooner had they entered the house than they were shown through it to the garden. The butler informed them that Miss Darcy had decided tea was to be served outdoors, so as to enjoy the rare sunlight. Georgiana, however, was still indoors trying to determine the logistics of this, and the Bingleys had not yet returned from their visit to the Gardiners, leaving the Fitzwilliams to wander the garden at their leisure.

There were a few early hazelnuts on the ground between the kitchen garden and the shrubberies, as the summer had been very wet and cool enough for some of the nuts to harden early. Elizabeth turned to her husband, eyes alight. “Do you remember the first time we met?”

“In Kent? Very vividly. As soon as Mr. Collins called on Lady Catherine and mentioned his cousin, Miss Elizabeth Bennet, was staying with him, I dragged Darcy out of Rosings at once. I fancy I managed to hide my eagerness to know you by disguising it as escape from Lady Catherine, who was once again asking wistfully after Miss Elliot.”

“The name sounds familiar.”

“Darcy unfortunately lost his head over her the spring previous. Thank God nothing came of it, but mention of it was still deeply embarrassing to Darcy. He kept pace with me quite well.” He pulled affectionately on one of her curls. “Quite a feat! I was almost marching quicktime; I am not sure I could describe how I felt except to say that was like the anticipation before a battle, but without the fear.”

Elizabeth was too intrigued by this to go gather the hazelnuts immediately. “Did you suspect even then?”

“Yes,” he said, smiling at her. “Or rather, I _hoped_.”

“When did you _know_?”

“It was embarrassingly early in our acquaintance,” said Colonel Fitzwilliam. “In my justification, I knew of you by report before then, from both Darcy and Aunt Catherine, and had been intrigued by you—”

“You delay sir, you delay! How early?”

He admitted, rather sheepishly, “I did not know for certain until you hinted a few days before I proposed that your mark was an English name, albeit an unusual one, but... I _knew_ at the end of our very first meeting.”

“Really? I remember being a little annoyed my hair was windblown and that I hadn't worn a nicer gown, so I cannot imagine you were struck by my beauty. And I cannot think of anything I did that was particularly charming.”

“You cannot remember _my_ cousin standing on his dignity about a horse chestnut tree for some reason that now escapes me, and _your_ cousin being very pompous for no reason at all, and your mocking their solemnities without either of them noticing?”

“That sounds like me,” she said, tapping a finger against her chin, in mock abstraction, “but I cannot recall what I did.”

“You cannot recall leaning forward looking charmingly serious— except for a certain twinkle in your eye— to ask me, as the resident military man, how my time in the Peninsula had affected my conkers- playing tactics?” He then noticed she was pulling the ribbons from the sleeves of her gown, and raised an eyebrow.

Elizabeth pulled the ribbons free and scooped up a handful of hazelnuts. She held these out and said, very innocently, “It entirely slipped my mind.”

Sir Richard laughed. “My dear, your attempts at natural science appear to have been entirely forgot, even if our first meeting was not. Those are not chestnuts.”

“We play by Hertfordshire rules, good sir, not Derbyshire! Hazelnuts _may_ be substituted when chestnuts are not available.”

And so the Darcys found Colonel Sir Richard Fitzwilliam, KGB, and Elizabeth, Lady Fitzwilliam, not five minutes later, swinging long ribbons of hazelnuts at each other. It was perhaps not something that a new-made knight and his lady ought to be doing, but Elizabeth decided that Darcy had caught them in more informal, and compromising scenes before and put him out of her head. She merely called out a breathless hello before darting out of the way of a particularly adventurous swing.

“You learnt too many evasive maneuvers on campaign,” grumbled Sir Richard, stumbling a little before regaining his balance.

Elizabeth twirled her conker string above her head and said, “As Wellington has it, the mark of a good general is knowing when to retreat, and having the good sense to do it.”

However, she was not very good in the attack, and managed to accidentally send her string flying out of her hand, back towards the shrubberies.

“It seems I won,” declared Sir Richard, grinning in the face of her exasperated look. He turned to Darcy and Georgiana very cheerfully. Elizabeth went hunting for her lost conker string since she could not tie shut the sleeves of her gown without it. By the time she had retrieved the ribbon and pulled off the remaining hazelnuts, the Bingleys had arrived, and by Jane’s expression and her alacrity in rushing towards Elizabeth, Mrs. Bennet had been at work.

But Jane was a good creature. After they had embraced each other and talked of the Gardiners, Jane pretended to be shocked that Elizabeth was expecting.

“I had no idea,” she said unconvincingly.

“Mama told everyone didn't she?” Elizabeth asked, with a sigh. “I really did think it was _my_ news to share; after all, I am the one carrying and birthing the child.”

“Mama is not always discreet,” said Jane, “but she told everyone because she was excited for you, and wished to stave off any unpleasant remarks.”

“I am so very glad I never told her I miscarried my first,” said Elizabeth, shaking her head. They linked arms and strolled back towards the terrace, where the others were drinking tea. “Mama would have brought it up whenever the Earl or Lady Catherine looked the slightest bit censorious at my childlessness.”

Jane could not deny this, so she changed the subject. “When are you due, Lizzy?”

“March.”

“Oh!” exclaimed Jane. “If Sir Richard can get leave, you must come stay with us. My midwife is a wonder. Dear Mrs. Perlman was so very kind, so very gentle, even when I was so frightened and in such pain, I could scarcely do anything but cry.”

“Perhaps I might persuade you and Charles to come stay with us instead?” Elizabeth asked. “I can say with some exactitude where we shall be for the foreseeable future.”

“Where?”

“Paris!” Elizabeth looked beamingly at Jane. “Richard’s been offered a position as military attaché to the British Embassy. It was all settled last night; Lord Pumphrey, from the Foreign Office, left us a very kind note this morning saying that he had sent off letters to Lord Wellington and Lord Grenville for their approval of the scheme, but highly doubted anyone would object.”

Jane looked extremely relieved to hear Elizabeth would be settled in one place, and immediately agreed to come to Paris from mid-February on, with or without her husband.

“With,” objected Mr. Bingley, hearing this, and rising at their approach with the other gentlemen. He helped Jane to a chair. “I am a veteran of this sort of action; Richard shall need me! If not as a guide than a... victualler, or a quartermaster or whatever it is called.”

“I hope you do not mean to perform the same kind office for him as Mr. Hurst did for you,” protested Jane, laughing.

“Only if the circumstances demand it.” Bingley turned to Sir Richard, who was helping Elizabeth into her chair with unusual care. “I have learnt from my own ordeal! I shall buy you your very own bottle of hawthorn as congratulations, and take defensive measures against our mutual enemy.”

Sir Richard and Elizabeth both laughed, and Jane hid a smile behind her teacup.

The Darcy siblings looked rather confused by this.

Sir Richard sat as he usually did when comfortable in company, angled slightly towards whoever was speaking, with an elbow balanced on the back of his chair. He turned to look at her. Elizabeth was briefly tempted to secure the joy of the announcement herself, but (nobly, she thought) offered, “They are your relations, my dear.”

“And yours as well, according to the Church of England, and the Hardwick Act of 1745.”

“I do not... quite have the pleasure of understanding you,” said Georgiana, haltingly.

“We shall go half and half,” declared Elizabeth, before taking the cup of tea from Georgiana. “Thank you. Georgiana, Colonel Fitzwilliam— I suppose I ought to call you Sir Richard now?— has been reassigned to the British Embassy in Paris, as a military attaché. The Bingleys have just been so good as to agree to come stay with us next February and March.”

“Oh that is wonderful!” Georgiana exclaimed, setting down the teapot quickly enough to cause the lid to rattle slightly. “You shall be away from any fighting, Richard. I am so glad to hear you will be safe! But...” She looked over at Mr. Bingley. “I... do not quite understand what you meant, Mr. Bingley.”

Darcy had, and looked vaguely uncomfortable. He said, “Ah... Georgiana it—”

Mr. Bingley laughed. “I beg your pardon, Miss Darcy, but whenever I am excited I seem to speak a great deal without conveying any information at all.”

“ _I_ understood what you meant to say, and am very thankful for your generous offer of supply and reinforcement,” said Sir Richard, smiling. “I accept it with alacrity. You are more than a brother-in-law, Charles, you are a brother-in-arms!”

“You have conveyed as little information as Charles to poor Georgiana,” said Elizabeth, laughing.

“Georgiana, Charles and I are just being ridiculous about our mother-in-law, who so kindly announced the birth of Jenny by rushing into the drawing room exclaiming, ‘Mr. Bingley, I am so sorry!’”

“I nearly fainted,” reported Mr. Bingley, cheerfully enough. “As it was, your cousin had to run for smelling salts. It was very fortunate Lizzy was there, or I would have no doubt swooned like a Drury Lane heroine and plunged the entire household into more chaos than it had already experienced.”

“Oh yes, my brother told me of this,” said Georgiana, glancing over at Darcy, who looked as if he was trying to conceal a bad toothache. “But I do not... _oh_.”

“To finish conveying all that Charles did not,” said Sir Richard, beaming, “there is a particular reason the Bingleys have agreed to come see us when they did. Lizzy is expecting a child this March.”

Georgiana’s raptures were heartfelt and sincere, and Elizabeth, though not wishing so young and easily frightened a girl to be with her during childbirth, impulsively asked if Georgiana would care to come stay with them in Paris that October or November. A glance at Sir Richard was enough to confirm his approval, and his own pleasure that she had thought to offer; Darcy looked less pleased and muttered something vague about how quickly England forgot it had been at war with France.

“The wars are hopefully over,” said Sir Richard, absently tapping out a military tattoo on the edge of the table. “It is... well. You do have a point, coz. Napoleon is a tenacious weed to uproot.”

Elizabeth’s high spirits dimmed slightly. “You do not think he will escape St. Helena, surely?”

“I hope not. But there are still Bonapartists in France. Our ambassador’s fear of them has earned me my new post.”

“It is a safer post than one in the field.”

Sir Richard caught onto her anxiety. He moved his hand from the tabletop to take the hand laying in her lap and gently squeeze her fingers in reassurance. “Yes, much safer.”

“If it safe enough for Richard and Lizzy,” said Georgiana, tentatively, “surely it is safe enough for us to visit. Lizzy is going to have her baby there, and did not seem alarmed at the prospect, so—”

“Lady Fitzwilliam,” said Darcy, forebodingly, “has spent many years in far rougher situations than the one she now proposes to enter.”

“But she was my age when she was married,” Georgiana squeaked out, willing herself so strongly to forget her shyness it came out almost in tones Lady Catherine might use. “And she lived very retired in Hertfordshire before going to Spain.”

“Lady Fitzwilliam was one and twenty,” said Darcy, disapprovingly. “ _You_ are nineteen.”

“Well,” said Elizabeth, unwilling to let one of Georgiana’s rare fits of initiative be crushed, “I was twenty when I married. I turned one and twenty during my honeymoon.” She blushed a little. It had been rather a magnificent birthday, though the details of their activities that day were ones she did not care to share in company. In the corner of her eye she saw Sir Richard not trying very hard to hide his smirk.

“I will be twenty this fall,” said Georgiana bravely.

“And I have lived in Paris after an abdication of Napoleon's before,” Elizabeth said, “so I know it will be... perhaps not perfectly safe, but relatively so.”

“Safe as Lisbon,” agreed Sir Richard, cautiously.

“So you see,” Georgiana said, trembling like an autumn leaf on the branch, as she turned back to Darcy, “ _half_ of my guardians think a visit is not so bad an idea. Two thirds really.”

Elizabeth was very touched to be considered a guardian, though she did not think her guardianship would be upheld by any court of law.

“Mr. Bingley and I would be glad to have you join our party in February,” offered Jane, gently and kindly.

This was the opposite of what Elizabeth had wanted. Much as she loved the Darcy siblings, having them a witness to a moment of fear and pain so intense even Jane had been moved to weep and curse, sat uncomfortably with her.

“Do _you_ object to going to France?” Bingley asked Darcy, a little startled. “We can take Georgiana with us if so. It would be a very great pleasure to have her company.” Bingley was not one to be kept from smiling for very long; he was very soon grinning again and said, “I never knew _you_ belonged to the Beefsteak Club and so hated France. When you are so silent at the start of a meal, is it because you are singing ‘Rule Britannia’ in your head?”

“No,” said Darcy.

Elizabeth shot Sir Richard an inquisitive glance. She could not tell what had put Darcy into such a mood, or why he was so against visiting them in France. Darcy had not visited them during the peace in 1814, true enough, but that was because he and Georgiana had planned to go to France with them, after the usual Easter trip to Rosings, and Napoleon’s disinclination to remain on Elba had put a stop to those particular plans. Elizabeth supposed Darcy feared this might happen a second time. But St. Helena was so far, and everyone at the ball last night had been so very sure—

She uncomfortably rested her free hand on top of her stomach. Though she was not yet showing and had not felt the child quickening, the gesture felt natural, almost involuntary. Its function was the same as buckling on her husband's sword belt before a battle: a protective measure more valuable for its symbolism than its efficacy.

“Darcy,” said Sir Richard, gently squeezing Elizabeth’s other hand, in reassurance. “You are pessimistic. The situation in France is not so bad as you make it out to be.”

“Richard, you never acknowledge the danger of a situation until it explodes in your face,” said Darcy, exasperated. “Sometimes literally.”

“Are you accusing my husband of endangering his dependants?” Elizabeth asked. She asked it lightly enough that it could come off as good-natured teasing, but she felt really almost offended. “I assure you, I am more than capable of braving any danger, and I think Richard and I together, as well as the Anglo- Allied Army, are suitable defense against what partisans of Napoleon might wish to do harm to the English traveler. Indeed, sir, we have been living in France since Wellington chased Napoleon from Waterloo to Paris, without any more trouble than Blücher’s continual tussle for power with Wellington.”

“I am sure that is not what Mr. Darcy means,” Jane said quickly and soothingly.

“I by no means wish to level so severe a charge at my cousin,” said Darcy. “Only to suggest that Georgianna’s going to Paris this fall would not be the best idea. You will forgive the criticism Lady Fitzwilliam, but you think nothing of threatening to blow up powder carts. I do not think Georgiana would be as comfortable with such situations.”

“The likelihood of Georgiana having to threaten to blow up a powder cart to defend a baggage train is slim indeed,” said Elizabeth. “The only incendiary things Georgiana would face will be the wits at Madame de Staël’s salon.”

“You cannot possibly know that. Nor do I think Georgiana would be entirely happy in the company of women like Madame de Staël.”

Feeling that a friend of hers had been insulted, Elizabeth could not help but argue with Darcy. Ostensibly their quarrel was about Georgiana but it boiled down to what they always argued about: their differing notions of right behavior. These debates (not much different from disputes) generally ended with Sir Richard, Jane, or Bingley asking them to stop or flat out changing the subject. Today was different only in that Elizabeth ignored the hints to stop. She had remembered just how much Darcy had disliked and disapproved of her on their first meeting, and every subsequent meeting thereafter, until circumstances forced him to accept her as a family member, and this made her fractious, and inclined to ignore all her more diplomatic relations.

At the end of the visit, Elizabeth pulled Georgiana aside and said, “I am sorry if I caused you a moment’s discomfort, Georgiana; I did not mean to put you on the spot with my invitation, merely to offer you something I thought would bring you pleasure.”

“Oh it would!” Georgiana hastened to assure her. “I should like to see Paris and Vienna and Venice— I should like to hear La Grassini sing, and see how Mozart’s operas are staged where they were debuted, and hear Vivaldi performed by the girls in the foundling school where he taught—” She cut herself off, embarrassed to have been so lead astray by her enthusiasm.

Elizabeth smiled. “That is a very understandable desire! We have been these twenty years or so cut off from the Continent. It is time we reacquaint ourselves with our neighbors. I cannot understand why your brother would refuse.”

“He never liked hearing of the dangers you faced abroad,” said Georgiana, a little tentative. “I think....”

“Do you think he did not approve?”

“Of the situation, not of you. But I... oh, it is my fault. I always used to exclaim that I would not be half so brave as you in a like situation.”

“But it is not a like situation!” Elizabeth scowled. “Forgive me for saying so, Georgiana, but your brother can be one of the most _insufferable_ men. A like situation... oh yes, staying with the hero of Hougoumont, in or near the British Embassy in Paris, in a country tamed by the Anglo-Allied Army, with Bonaparte mouldering away on a rock in the middle of the Atlantic....” Though only days ago, Elizabeth had been just as pessimistic as Darcy, she could not bear to hear ideas she had abandoned thanks to the engulfing wave of three-fold joy over her pregnancy, her husband’s new position, and her and her husband’s triumph over the Earl of Matlock. The most trying problems of her personal life had been solved; she was inclined towards optimism. And, as she could support her opinion with a whole ballroom full of new made British knights and peers (albeit rather drunk ones), she really did believe she was right.

“You truly do not think it dangerous?”

“No more so than London,” replied Elizabeth. “I really wish your brother would not try to wrap you in cotton wool, as he does. You have grown up to be a very capable young woman.”

Georgiana looked at the ground very intently and said, “I... I have not always shown the best judgment.”

“Do not think for a moment that _you_ are at fault for Mr. Wickham’s lies,” said Elizabeth. “You were fifteen. How could you have known he was lying to you? Andthe very next year, you and Kitty managed to capture him using nothing more than your wits and a fireplace poker. Do you not think you learnt from so trying an experience, and grew to be the sort of person who would never be taken in by such a man again? And Paris is not full of rakes and rogues! It is a city like any other, full of as many good as bad people.” Elizabeth brooded on this a moment and said, “I really cannot understand your brother. But... I suppose....” She began to play with a theory and absently asked, “Georgiana, did you know your brother did not wish me to marry Colonel Fitzwilliam, because he thought we were not a match?”

Georgiana gaped at her. “No! That is— I knew my brother had reservations about your getting engaged but I thought it was because Richard has not a great deal of money—” Elizabeth would never get over the ridiculousness of thinking eight thousand a year meant dire poverty “—and probably not enough to support a wife... but it is so clear you and Richard are a match!”

“Yes, I fancy it is— else we would not be such a source of amusement to the Duke of Wellington.”

Georgiana was startled into a smile. “I cannot understand. Everyone I know says that you two are a _true match_ and truly happy. How could my brother not see it?”

“Oh, I lost his good opinion by having an uncle in trade,” she replied, quite seriously, despite her light and teasing tone. “And for having silly younger sisters, and a silly mother. Your brother told me once that his good opinion once lost, is lost forever... I had not wished to believe it true. I do not think it is _entirely_ true... but I do think that if he has formed a set idea, he will ignore all evidence to the contrary. He disliked me for a very long time before I married Richard and he had to put in a great deal of work to become resigned to me. I am usually quite impressed at how polite he is become, especially when I know we disagree on so much, but sometimes, I really do not think he can help that first impression coloring his judgement of anything I propose to do. I suppose I cannot fault him on that count. I am a great believer in first impressions myself.”

They finished their turn in the shrubbery only to see Darcy had come in search of them. He looked pained and out of sorts.

Though a little discomposed at the idea he had overheard them, Elizabeth greeted him cordially enough.

Darcy said, abruptly, “Georgiana— you know I wish only what is best for you?”

Georgiana was crimson with embarrassment at having voiced something even slightly critical of a brother she so idolized. She murmured something indistinct.

“I do not mean to be tyrannical,” he said.

“Perhaps then,” said Elizabeth, “you ought to consider that what you think is best for another person might not match their own understanding of what is best for themselves.”

Darcy struggled with himself and then said at last, “Georgiana, what is it _you_ wish to do?”

Georgiana looked up and said, in a faltering tone,”I— I very much want to see Europe, Fitzwilliam. There is only so much one can get from books and letters.”

The struggle continued; Darcy exhaled in a huff and said, “I am happy to take you to Belgium, Germany, Austria, or Switzerland— even Italy for that matter.”

“Do you object to France or to me, sir?” Elizabeth asked, tartly.

He looked a little abashed and said, “I object to putting myself and my sister into unpleasant scenes that could be avoided.”

“I do not understand how it would be unpleasant to visit our cousins,” said Georgiana, puzzled. “Unless... you do not think I would make it uncomfortable— but I promise I will not. I have learnt my lesson, truly, I have, and will not embarrass you—”

“That is not what I meant.” Darcy was beginning to look harassed.

Elizabeth put an arm around Georgiana’s shoulders and raised a defiant eyebrow.

Darcy gave in. “If, this October, Richard can assure me that Paris is safe and Georgiana will be in no danger whatever, we will come in November. But—” he added, when Georgiana brightened at once “— _only_ if I can be satisfied on every particular.”

The second week of October, Sir Richard showed Elizabeth the very short, rather grudging note Darcy sent, agreeing that he and Georgiana would come for a visit starting the last week of November.  Elizabeth glowed with triumph.

 

***

 

Adjusting to life outside the regiment had not taken very long; indeed, Elizabeth found the pattern of her days in Paris to be very similar to what it had been when she and her husband had last lived there, with the Army of Occupation. The cultural differences were more-or-less what she recalled, the difficulties of the language a little less now that she had spent significant time in both France and Belgium, and her duties differed only in the fact that Mrs. Kirke was not close enough to share in them. Elizabeth found it much more difficult to adjust to being pregnant. When the constant nausea passed, her appetite returned almost as a stranger; though she had been indifferent to cheese before, she longed for it in odd combinations and at odd hours, and the scent of coffee, which she had loved before, was enough to make her sick. She was constantly exhausted, and her long walks became weekly rather than daily exercise. Elizabeth could not stand to be entirely indoors all the time, however; it became her habit to meet some friend or other and stroll the boulevards by her lodgings or go for a slow tour of Paris’s many public parks, before going to her usual rounds of salons.

Going about in public was likewise an odd experience. Elizabeth was not a large woman and showed early, which every stranger seemed to take as invitation to comment on her appearance, ask when she was due, or regale her with horror stories of childbed. They only stopped when she took her walks with the Duke of Wellington, who often kept company with the Fitzwilliams on his frequent visits from Cambrai to Paris. (Their house was comfortable, their conversation lively, and Elizabeth kept a good but simple table which pleased the Duke, who often complained that the French ruined their food by putting too much on it.)  

In the relative anonymity that came with being the companion of so famous a man, Elizabeth could examine the woods in the Bois de Boulogne, or the slack-rope dancers above her on the Boulevard du Temple without having to answer impertinent questions. The attention was all on Wellington, and the few who dared to approach them tended to speak to Wellington rather than herself.

Wellington preferred to have Elizabeth as a walking companion over anyone else, for she knew when to let him converse with someone and when to rescue him. Then, too, she never made him talk, and when he did bring up his favorite topics of past battles, the military, or music, she would respond with well-informed interest.

This did have its drawbacks.

By the end of October, Madame de Staël was under the impression that Elizabeth was the Duke of Wellington’s new mistress.

“On the basis of walking with me, the... what, the two or three times a month he is in Paris?” Elizabeth asked, rather exasperated.

Madame de Staël, much amused, replied that news of an Englishwoman riding with Wellington on military reviews had reached Paris, not the lady’s name— but given Wellington’s clear preference for her company while she was in Paris, and her going to these reviews, had caused most of Paris to think it Elizabeth.

“But that was Frances, Lady Shelley!” Elizabeth exclaimed, very much vexed. “And I only go because Sir Richard must, as part of his duties. And I would not ride— indeed I _do_ not ride now.” She cupped a hand protectively over the swell of her abdomen. “I... well, I lost my first when I fell off a horse while riding.”

Madame de Staël was not an attractive woman, but her eyes were intelligent and expressive. In them was a depth of sympathy that made Elizabeth look away for fear of crying otherwise. She had not meant to mention her miscarriage, and did not know what to do now that she had. She scarcely had words to talk about it in English, let alone French.

Elizabeth's French was also not at a level to refute the rumor that she was the Duke of Wellington’s mistress as vehemently as she would have wished, and Madame de Staël did not consider the Fitzwilliams being a true match this proof of anything. She instead engaged Elizabeth on a long, but extremely interesting debate on Rousseau’s idea that, as people were all born blank slates, the appearance of a soulmark was the mark of a society’s influence on an individual, and how that individual’s adherence to their society’s dominant paradigm of soulmarks fed into the notion of social contracts.

Thankfully, the majority of the Anglo-Allied Army thought the rumors as ridiculous as Elizabeth did. It had been a running joke that Wellington always had to send an aide-de-camp to find Mrs. Fitzwilliam, if he wished to find the Colonel, and Colonel Fitzwilliam’s command at Hougoumont was generally understood to be one of the three major factors that caused the French to lose Waterloo. Of course a man that capable (or that lucky) would be rewarded. Lady Fitzwilliam was of course charming, and just the sort of pretty, witty young thing that Wellington usually liked, but she was notoriously devoted to her husband, and talked of their being a true match with such simple pride, it was impossible to believe she would be unfaithful— nor did anyone think Wellington would use so ill a man who had done him such good service.

The French did not much care as to confirm the veracity of the rumor; in fact, it rather improved Elizabeth's social standing than not. Sir Richard found it amusing rather than offensive, and was well versed enough in society gossip to believe it would pass swiftly over. “As soon as they hear the British press expects Captain Wedderburn-Webster to sue the Duke for holding criminal conversation with Lady Frances Wedderburn-Webster, it will be forgot. You know my dear, I take it as a great compliment to you.”

Elizabeth, who now could not fit into any of her dresses and was perhaps disproportionately annoyed by it, did not believe him. They did not actually quarrel, since Sir Richard would not rise to her bait, but Elizabeth retired in a huff, requested and ate a supper of cake with a side of pickled cucumber, and then wrote a very irritated letter to Marjorie about it all.

Marjorie’s letter, couched as it was in very charming, very vague terms, read more or less, ‘You are pregnant and having mood swings as a result, calm down over a rumor that will pass quickly enough,’ which infuriated Elizabeth because it was right. She was in rather a petulant mood when going to a ball at Lady Shelley’s the next evening, and at first ignored one of the many British tourists trying to gain her attention.

Then she realized the man was not unknown to her, and she pulled on her husband’s arm. “Richard— who is that? He seems to know us, but I cannot place him.”

Sir Richard followed the line of her gaze, frowning and then said, “Why that cannot be... is it Colonel Brandon?”

The gentleman smiled and moved closer, a pretty woman perhaps twenty years his junior in tow. He held out his hand and said, “Sir Richard! I thought it was you.”

“Colonel Brandon,” said Sir Richard, lighting up. “How are you, sir? And this cannot be your niece, little Eliza!”

“No,” said Colonel Brandon. “This is my wife.”

Sir Richard recovered from the surprise of this before Elizabeth did; she was still staring at the Brandons as he said,  “I beg your pardon, ma’am! It has been decades since I last had the good fortune to meet your husband. Are you on active duty, sir?”

“I inherited my brother’s estate of Delaford,” said Colonel Brandon, “and am on half-pay at present, unattached to any regiment. I have heard from one of my cousins the great accomplishments of _your_ regiment, sir. My cousin Lieutenant Brandon is very proud to be serving in your light company.”

“If I have accomplished anything, it was only thanks to your tutelage,” said Sir Richard, turning to Elizabeth. “Lizzy, my dear, I think you know Colonel Brandon? He was my first commanding officer, in the East Indies. Colonel Brandon, Mrs. Brandon, my wife, Lady Fitzwilliam.”

Elizabeth curtsied and murmured something in a tone of voice that implied pleasure, though she was still feeling extremely awkward.

“May I introduce my wife, Mrs. Marianne Brandon?” asked Colonel Brandon.

“How do you find Paris, Mrs. Brandon?” asked Elizabeth, politely. “Have you been here long?”

“We have only just arrived and yet I find we have been here too long already,” she said. “I do not care for cities in general. Give me an open field and sky any day!”

“Lady Fitzwilliam is very much of your thinking as well,” said Sir Richard, with a laugh.

“Oh fie, sir, fie,” Elizabeth replied, laughing. “As I increase, I grow increasingly civilized. I am currently in no condition for my usual rambles. I am very well contented with city parks for the time being.”

“Oh, tamed nature,” said Mrs. Brandon, despairingly. “The imposition of civilized man on the wild, turning the sublime into the merely beautiful. I wonder how you can be content with it.”

Elizabeth put a hand to her swollen abdomen. “I find I must be a philosopher when my circumstances do not allow me greater opportunity to be a naturalist. There are some remarkably fine parks in Paris, Mrs. Brandon. Perhaps you might go walking with me in the Jardin de Luxembourg, or the Parc Monceau? There is enough variety of human imagination there to make up in interest what was lost in natural beauty.”

This was agreed too, and Colonel Brandon offered to bring along his niece as well.

“It has been some years since I last saw Eliza; I should be glad to meet her again,” said Sir Richard. “Is she with you this evening?”

“Her health is delicate,” said Colonel Brandon, a little stiffly. “She suffered a severe illness when she was fifteen, and she has never fully recovered; such hot rooms as these rather increase her misery than give her pleasure.”

This seemed an overdramatic way of saying ‘no.’ When they were home again, and had dismissed their servants for the evening, Elizabeth asked if the Brandons had always been quite so dramatic.

“Colonel Brandon was... rather Byronic, before Byron had even put pen to paper,” admitted Sir Richard, emerging from his dressing room in night shirt and banyan.

Elizabeth shook free her hair into its usual evening mess of frizz, curls, and straight sections, and began brushing it all out into her hair’s natural wave. “Mrs. Brandon is, ah. Much younger than her husband.”

Sir Richard buried his face in his hands.

“It is... natural to have made a mistake,” said Elizabeth, pretending the most difficult, absorbing task in the world was brushing her hair.

Her husband made a distressed noise. “I can’t believe I did that.”

“It is a little... odd that Colonel Brandon has a wife the exact same age as his illegitimate daughter,” said Elizabeth.

“ _I_ _t is very odd!_ ” He dragged his hands down his face. "Though technically Eliza is his niece."

"Are you sure of that?"

"Unfortunately not."

Elizabeth made her now ungainly climb into bed, making inarticulate huffs of annoyance and protest until Sir Richard got the hint, and helped her arrange everything until she was comfortable. Tonight she found it best to sit between her husband’s spread legs, leaning against his shoulder, and with a pillow stuffed behind her aching lower back. He wrapped his arms about her as best he could, but mostly traced vague patterns over the convex surface of her midsection. Elizabeth closed her eyes. These were her favorite moments of pregnancy: the sense of quiet, unspoken connection, the contented, idle enjoyment of mere existence. She felt what might have been indigestion but lingered long enough for Elizabeth to seize Sir Richard’s right hand and put it over the little spasm.

“Enough of Colonel Brandon," said Elizabeth. "I think that is the child quickening."

Richard pressed his hand against her eagerly and said, in a tone of delight and wonder, “Is it? She’s certainly as lively as her mother already.”

“You really would like a girl?” Elizabeth asked, tilting her head slightly to the side, so she might best observe him.

He smiled and dropped a kiss on the end of her nose, which caused her to laugh. “I want your child, whatever it may be. I am not particular.”

Elizabeth settled deeper into his embrace, leaning her forehead against the side of his neck. “That or you know my mother's feelings on the subject.”

His chuckle rumbled through her pleasantly. “Everyone does. What on earth possessed her to announce the arrival of her first grandchild with an apology? We all thought Jane had died in childbirth.”

Elizabeth laughed. “Not an unnatural supposition! But I suppose my mother wished to stave off Mr. Bingley’s displeasure when Jane was too weak to defend herself. My parents were unable to have sons, a fact which must have grieved them very sorely until Jane and I managed to give them such fine sons-in-law.”

Her hand still rested on top of his own. He raised her hand to his lips, and, kissing it, said, “Well and thank God we are not your parents, my dear. We have no entail to worry us. I should be very happy with a daughter. I think I might even prefer it. _Two_ Lizzys in my life would only increase my happiness. I should like to read little Lizzy French _contes de fee_ , and buy her too many hair ribbons. I can already see the week-long tiff we shall have about how I failed to consult you before buying her a pony for her fifth birthday.”

Elizabeth pressed the palm of her hand to his cheek. “Darling man! I almost forgive you for the pony.”

 

***

 

The day the Darcys were expected, Elizabeth had the galling experience of knowing that Darcy’s judgment was— at least once— superior to her own.

Wellington had driven her from Madame de Staël’s salon to the Embassy when there was a sharp noise, almost like a gunshot, and the nearest window shattered.

Elizabeth and Wellington, already half-prepared to dismount, both immediately flung themselves down onto the gravel driveway, as they might have done on a battlefield; Wellington raised his head first and said, “Too much time on campaign, Mrs. Fitz! One of the wheels must have sent up a bit of gravel.”

Wellington’s light tone was belied by his looking fixedly at the sentries posted at the beginning of the drive, one of whom was missing; Elizabeth followed the line of Wellington's gaze to see the other sentry had his musket raised and was aiming down an alley. Wellington had only to turn his head and look at the redcoats posted at the entrance of the embassy for them to slip quietly over to their compatriot.

The unpleasant suspicion that Darcy had been right, that Paris was still full of mortal peril, began to grab hold of Elizabeth. Unfortunately, it already had hold of the ambassador’s wife and several of her friends, who were taking leave of each other on the steps, began to scream and insist that they were all going to be murdered.

“Not at all, not at all,” said Wellington soothingly, as some highly nervous functionary appeared and declared that this was tantamount to an act of war. “Bit of gravel caught in the wheel, that’s all.”

“But Lady Fitzwilliam!” Lady Granville cried. “She is dead!”

“No, no, just fainted,” Wellington lied. “Poor lady! Quite took me with her.”

“What?” hissed Elizabeth.

“Pray oblige me and faint, madam.”

It was said with the crisp swiftness of an order; several years of military discipline had their effect, and Elizabeth went limp.

Wellington put an arm about her shoulders and another under her knees, calling out, in a tone of put-upon impatience that Lady Fitzwilliam had fainted, what the devil were all these louts who called themselves servants doing, lolloping about, being useless, when a lady was in distress? Though Elizabeth had a sudden stab of fear that she would be heavy and would be unceremoniously dropped to the ground, Wellington picked her up easily enough, and managed to rise in a smooth motion that kept Elizabeth from panicking and showing she had not really fainted. The other ladies were a little more settled by this and grew by degrees calmer, as they discussed poor Lady Fitzwilliam's health— she was so lively a creature one forgot how little a thing she was— and this her first child! Poor dear, they remembered the sufferings that they had with their first children, etc.

It dawned on Elizabeth, as Wellington began walking, that he proposed to carry her into the Embassy. “Your Grace,” she muttered.

“Fainted dead away,” said Wellington, rather steely.

“This will certainly help with rumors,” Elizabeth groused, before going limp again. But she was also a little glad she did not have to walk and appear unaffected. She felt shaken, and was rather sure that if she had tried to stand and walk on her own, her legs might have trembled too much to support her, as always happened after danger had passed.

“You know,” Wellington said, _sotto voce_ , once they had passed the startled guards and other embassy staff, towards Sir Richard’s office, “there are some ladies in this city who would envy you, being carried thus.”

“Then you should have ordered one of them to faint,” muttered Elizabeth.

“Are you this cheeky to your husband, madam?”

“Considerably more so, sir.”

Sir Richard was in his office, with one of the cats that always seemed to gravitate towards him when he was in one place for more than a fortnight at a time. The cat tumbled from his lap with a yowl as he leapt up to stand at attention.

“Your Grace, to what do I owe this unexpected—” Then he caught sight of Elizabeth, limp in the arms of the Duke of Wellington. The blood drained from his face. The office exploded into further confusion; sergeants ran in and out, Sir Richard, in his battlefield bellow, demanded his aide-de-campe run for a doctor, everyone to get out, for the windows to be opened— then he whirled on Wellington and said, in honest panic, “What's happened? Is Lizzy alright?”

“Send all these useless fellows away,” said Wellington, fighting to get through the room towards a chair. Elizabeth supposed his arms must be getting tired, but, she thought pettishly, remaining limp and observing everything from underneath her eyelashes, that was what he deserved if he wanted to pick up a woman nearly six months pregnant. He ought to have expected she'd be heavier than his usual armfuls.

“Your wife fainted, sir,” said Wellington, depositing her on a couch before the fire.

“Lizzy fainted?” Sir Richard asked, shocked out of his panic. “ _My_ Lizzy? She's never fainted in her life.”

“Nor has she,” said Elizabeth, raising her head, once several servants had scurried off, Wellington had locked the door, and Sir Richard’s aide-de-campe had decamped to find a doctor. She struggled to get upright. Elizabeth was still navigating the adjustments made necessary by having her center of gravity so dramatically shift, and the longer skirts and petticoats necessary to cover both her abdomen and ankles. “For all love— Richard, help me up. I feel like a turtle turned on its back.”

He was already at her side and did so at once, rather automatically wedging a pillow behind her so there was less chair to navigate if she wanted to stand, and so that her back didn't hurt from sitting. Sir Richard had always been an affectionate husband, taking pleasure in the little intimacies and touches allowed between spouses, but her pregnancy had made him an unusually attentive one. If she hadn't found it so difficult to move from sitting to standing she might have found his constant attendance officious or irritating, but as it was she was rather grateful.  

“I am afraid I have not the pleasure of understanding what is going on,” Sir Richard admitted.

Elizabeth looked heavenward. “His Grace didn't want to talk to anyone over his being shot at— particularly not a terrified Ambassadress— so he had me pretend to faint. I was a passport through enemy territory.”

“How baldly you put it,” said Wellington, though he was rather amused than otherwise. “But I can't contradict your lady’s report, sir; I thought it best to come directly to you than rely upon terrified intermediaries.”

“I hope my men have all been acting as they ought?”

“Indeed, one seemed to be in pursuit of my assassin, while his compatriot watched his back. Well-trained, your lads.”

“All the men at the Embassy were with me at Hougoumont.”

But despite their skill and efficiency, the men were unable to find their target, a man, possibly an officer, in a blue French infantry coat and shako, with a pistol. Wellington proved rather intransigent at this news. He wanted no fuss to be raised. He refused any idea of a guard. He hated the idea of anyone thinking an attempt had been made on his life, even if that was what had actually happened. His own aides would get the same story about Lady Fitzwilliam fainting and taking him down with her as the Ambassadress had. “Fancy what would happen if Grenville discovered there might be an assassin loose! He'd flee immediately to the Prince Regent, insisting I'm wrong, Blücher’s right and France ought to be razed to the ground. We'd have a second French Revolution within six months, and a third Napoleonic empire within a fortnight of that.”

“Sir, I know you think a search for an assassin would cause all this, but a successful assassination would do the same,” said Sir Richard. “I have learnt my own lesson of the perils of playing down dangers, and ignoring warning signs. I probably would have died after Quatre Bras if I hadn't listened to Lady Fitzwilliam about having a bit of shirt left in my arm.”

“One man cannot be allowed to cause the destruction of our peace, Colonel.”

“One bullet might, whether you allow it or not, Your Grace.”

Wellington sighed. “Fine. Tell Lord Pumphrey, in the Foreign Office. He’s often solved delicate problems for me. Increase the number of redcoats about the Embassy, but if anyone asks, only say that Pumphrey got you more funds, and you hate to see any member of your regiment out of work.”

This was agreed to. When they were alone again, Elizabeth rubbed the outermost part of her stomach and asked, “Richard, do you think we are in danger?”

“No more than usual,” he replied, sinking into his desk chair. “Perils of the profession, Lizzy. I ought to have sold out.”

“I like the profession,” protested Elizabeth. “The happiest part of my life has been following the drum. Pray stop taking a choice of which I am rather proud and turning it into some... vale of suffering through which you forced me to march at bayonet point. I wouldn't change my life. It's been more interesting than I could have dreamt.”

He smiled at her but said, “I am shocked that Lydia has yet to tell you of the Chinese curse: may you live in interesting times.”


	5. In which all ends happily

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I entirely invented the incident on the Boulevard du Temple, though I borrowed heavily (once again) from the actual 1818 assassination attempt, and borrowed Lord Pumphrey entirely from the Sharpe series. I did not invent either the Onion Song (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5nzRd1Il59w) or the Byron stanzas about a failed assassination attempt on the Duke of Wellington (among other things) (https://petercochran.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/don_juan_canto_9.pdf).

The Darcys arrived in time for dinner that evening, and, having heard from the servants that Elizabeth had fainted at the Embassy, were full of alarums and worries.

“We do not need to dine formally,” Georgiana said anxiously. “Not after so trying a day.”

“It was... an interesting morning,” said Sir Richard.

“It was really nothing, Georgiana,” Elizabeth protested. “I never even lost consciousness. I am well enough for dinner, and to take you around Paris tomorrow.”

Sir Richard looked speakingly at her.

“Well, perhaps not the latter,” she said. "Perhaps we might stay at home tomorrow."

“I would be very grateful for some time to recover from the journey,” said Georgiana eagerly. “And your garden is so pretty. Why do we not just sit in the garden tomorrow?”

To this Elizabeth grudgingly assented, and soon regretted, for both Darcy siblings hovered about her, apparently terrified at any moment she would suddenly drop dead before them. She was incredibly glad when the Brandons called and managed to distract her cousins. Mrs. Brandon treated Georgiana with as much friendliness as if they had known each other their entire lives, and the two of them spent the afternoon playing four-hand pieces on the piano. Elizabeth talked to Colonel Brandon and Miss Williams, while Darcy listened on, still looking worried and unhappy.

Elizabeth was out of charity with Darcy more than usual, partly because he kept looking at her with such concern, but mostly because he had managed to be right. It infuriated her that he had understood the situation in Paris so much better than she did.

But, she reminded herself, it was not Darcy’s fault she had been foolishly optimistic. She sighed, admitted that Paris was still not entirely tamed and talked as frankly as she felt she could to the party about what dangers still existed. She could not tell them how, when Sir Richard had asked Lord Pumphrey who might wish to murder the Duke of Wellington, Lord Pumphrey had dryly replied, “How about the entire population of France?” but it was at the tip of her tongue. In her confusion over what was and was not classified information, Elizabeth felt she sounded only vague and incoherent. Darcy certainly looked at her as if she had been.

“I think,” said Colonel Brandon, looking expressively at Elizabeth's swollen midsection, “that perhaps you are more subject to agitations at present. I have seen no real dangers in Paris, in all the time we have been here.”

Elizabeth knew she ought to be pleased her own opinion had been so supported, but she instead fumed over the fact that she had once again been reduced to the beloved archetype of Pregnant Woman. Elizabeth Bennet Fitzwilliam and her opinions and experiences were seldom if ever of interest when people could instead fit her into the role of expectant mother. Exasperatingly enough, Darcy, a person she had always expected to see _her_ if only because he always saw her flaws and had been at pains to point them out in the past, seemed to fall prey to this sort of thinking as well. 

“I realize it’s very prominent,” said Elizabeth, drawing her nightgown taut over her belly, and staring down at it, when preparing for bed that evening, “but it seems that’s all everyone sees these days. Your cousin Darcy especially.”

Sir Richard already sprawled on the bed, communing with a cat Elizabeth had acquired for the kitchen (though it always seemed to be sleeping on her bed rather than chasing mice). “I had noticed at dinner Darcy was...” he paused and absently scratched the cat on the cheek. “Awkward. More so than usual. I think he is anxious.”

Elizabeth examined herself from the side in her mirror and tried to suck in her stomach. It had no effect whatsoever. “What on earth is making him so anxious? I... admitted as much as I could without saying, ‘oh by the by, yesterday I witnessed an assassination attempt on the Duke of Wellington,’ but Darcy seemed to hardly take it in. I don't suppose,” she added, hopefully, “you have found all you needed to find and can be at home with me tomorrow?”

“I found nothing,” said Sir Richard, reluctantly. “Lord Pumphrey showed me his files on all the known plots against Wellington— there are two times as many as even I was aware of— and it's rather disheartening. How is one to discover _which_ disgruntled veteran nerves himself up to actually shoot at Wellington? The house where the officer disappeared was abandoned, and entirely empty. I would take managing Darcy’s anxieties over shifting through French hostility any day.”

“Please trade with me,” Elizabeth said melodramatically.

“I think we would both be happier if we could, darling,” he replied, jamming the pillows into a loose slope. “But here, I've a way to make the day a little better for you. Come lay down.”

She did so, moving about pillows to lay nearly on her front. This eased some of the pressure off her low back and she sighed, trying to release some of the day’s tension.

“A Brahmin chap in the East Indies told me the lower castes think you can rub most pains away,” Sir Richard said. “Where does it hurt most, my dear?”

She gestured vaguely at her lower back and was pleased to say that Sir Richard's 'Brahmin chap' had not led him astray.

“Mrs. Kearney sent me a letter about acupressure,” she said, closing her eyes contentedly. “I wish she was in Paris. I thought I should never stop being nauseous until she stuck me full of needles at that review in October. This must be something similar. Why are you stopping?”

“Because,” he said, palm flat against the small of her back, “I've had something of a realization, my dear, and it's not one that I think you'll like.”

“I shall be less annoyed if I am not physically in pain,” she hinted.

He dutifully continued his ministrations, and said, “I know the foolishness of asking you not to be angry, for it would be an impossible promise to require, but please bear in mind that this is only my theory and it might not be right.”

“I shall.”

“I think Darcy may be so awkward at present because the last time he saw you pregnant, you fell off your horse and miscarried, and he fears witnessing such a thing a second time.”

Elizabeth pushed herself upright, immediately full of indignation. “I am so sorry one of the most horrifying misfortunes to ever happen to me makes him _uncomfortable._ How terrible for him, that my current, greatest fear makes him feel _awkward_!”

Sir Richard touched her soothingly on the shoulder. “My dear, I know. I know. But people cannot always control what they fear and how they feel it. The fire in my office was smoking the other day and I was suddenly convinced the whole Embassy was going to burn down around me like the farm at Hougoumont. I terrified all the secretaries and annoyed all the French servants by refusing to work in my office until the flue was repaired, but I could not bear to be in a room so filled with smoke. And didn’t you say that when one of the maids burnt one of the linens she was ironing last week, you got so suddenly frightened you had to walk to the Embassy at once, to make sure I was still alive?”

“Yes,” she said reluctantly. “But that’s all... battle-orderly. It’s one of the souvenirs of campaign; everyone in our military circles experiences something of the sort. Civilians—”

“I cannot think the divide between military and civilian as dramatic as that. Georgiana still refuses to ever go back to Ramsgate.”

Elizabeth grudgingly sank back down into the pillows. “Oh all right. It does make a certain amount of sense, and Darcy would be the sort of man so bewildered by his own emotions he would neither recognize them nor be able to express them. I shall do my best to endure his awkwardness.”

“It comes from a place of caring.”

“And exits through the blowpipe of backhanded compliments.”

“I promise to fling myself before it when I can,” her husband replied, trying not to laugh.

The next day Darcy was still over anxious about her and the calls of Elizabeth's military friends did not much help. The dangers Elizabeth laughed over with other army wives seemed to enthrall, if not pleasantly scandalize Georgiana, but made Darcy even more gloomy.

“Why don’t we go for a walk?” Elizabeth asked, as Darcy brooded by the fire, apparently miserable to hear about the time Mrs. Lennox had repeatedly beat a French hussar over the head with a parasol, and so impressed a band of Spanish guerillas she had been invited to join their number. Elizabeth could not in the least understand Darcy. Mrs. Lennox was a large, jovial woman, and tremendously funny. That Time I Was Invited To Become a Guerilla was one of her best stories. Georgiana had been in whoops. Elizabeth herself had wiped away tears of laughter multiple times.

“Are you feeling quite up to it, Mrs. Fitzwilliam?” asked Darcy.

“Yes,” she replied, trying not to look as irritated as she felt. “All our footmen and grooms used to be infantryman—”

“The same infantrymen the Duke of Wellington called the scum of the earth?”

“We skimmed the top of the scum, when staffing the household,” said Elizabeth dryly. “Really Darcy, there is no pleasing you. You say Paris is dangerous, and I tell you that our servants are many years habituated to defeating the French—”

“I refer to your health, madame.”

“What?”

“You are... not large, madam, and the last child—”

Elizabeth shot a warning look at Georgiana.

Darcy hastily skipped over this to “—and you seem to me overtired by the strain. You are not a woman prone to fainting—”

“If I faint any one of the servants could easily lift me,” said Elizabeth, struggling to keep her temper and be kind. It was difficult to focus on the real kindness and concern Sir Richard insisted Darcy apparently had for her when Darcy expressed it in a way most likely to alarm and offend. “Your average infantryman is used to carrying grown men with full kit off the field. Even at six months I cannot measure up to the weight of an infantryman with musket, ammunition, and pack. We might,” she added, recalling her husband’s offer, “first go by the Embassy. We can collect as many servants there as you feel necessary to your safety.” Then, recalling that Wellington was back in Cambrai, and she need not fear assassins, added, “Or is necessary to your consequence.”

“That is not necessary, I assure you,” said Darcy.

“Do you think Richard might come with us?” asked Georgiana, too excited to be affected by Darcy’s Mood.

“I’m certain he’ll make a point of it,” said Elizabeth. She was correct on this count. Their walking through the Jardin de Luxembourg unmolested went a long way to soothing Elizabeth’s own fears— and she was affected by Wellington’s judgment as most military personnel. If he thought there was nothing to fuss about, then there _was_ nothing to fuss about. She began to get more adventurous with her guests.

Elizabeth at first kept to entertainments that seemed to her close enough parallels to London the Darcys would not be unduly uncomfortable, and often invited the Brandons along, if Sir Richard could not be spared from his duties at the Embassy. They walked in the pleasure gardens of Tivoli, which, like Vauxhall, offered ices, music, and fireworks; they walked in the tamer public parks of the Luxembourg and Tuileries, which were very like St. James and Hyde Park; they visited shops in the Palais Royale similiar to those on Bond Street; they went to the Theatre Royale, which, with the exception of the language and the plays put on, was very like Haymarket. But Georgiana said, after about three weeks of this, “Pray, Lizzy— why do we so hate the French if their amusements are so similar to our own?”

“Possibly because they are so similar,” said Elizabeth, not looking up from a letter from Mrs. Collins. “There is just enough difference to make us uncomfortable.”

Darcy let out a faint huff of amusement, but Georgiana said, uncertainly, “I suppose, but... but is there anything the French enjoy that we do not? Besides invading Spain and all that.”

“Hm,” said Elizabeth, laying aside her letter, and lacing her hands over her stomach. “A hard question, since we _also_ enjoy conquering huge tracts of land that are not properly ours and are, in fact, still inhabited by other people. Ah! I’ve got it. There is an amusement that does not yet have an English equivalent: _flanerie._ ”

“What is that?”

“It is something made possible by all Napoleon’s boulevards. One walks up and down them looking at everything, while being pleasant to look at oneself. One enjoys and yet contributes to the spectacle. I suppose our closest equivalent would be the dandies strolling on Bond Street, but here the women are expected to do their part as well.”

Elizabeth chose the Boulevard du Temple for their outing, as this boulevard had the largest concentration of theatres, and in the afternoons, actors, musicians, puppeteers, acrobats and mimes all plied their trade on the wide, tree-lined streets, in the hopes of luring passersby into their evening performances. The Duke of Wellington arrived from Cambrai as they were about to set out and, looking significantly at Elizabeth, proposed to join them.

Though concerned Wellington might be set upon again, Georgiana's desire to visit the boulevard and Wellington’s hint that he need to talk privately with her outweighed Elizabeth’s initial hesitation. She did, however, send a note to Sir Richard appraising him of the plan and suggesting that if he had any spare redcoats idling about the Embassy, a walk might do them good. “A walk will do us all good!” she exclaimed, with rather more optimism than surety.

She was wrong.

Wellington was too attentive to her, and talked too eagerly of music with Georgiana to please Darcy. Elizabeth was willing to admit that Duke of Wellington did have a certain reputation for rakishness, but neither a shy debutante who was so star-struck, she could not manage a sentence longer than five words incoherently jammed together, nor the hugely pregnant wife of one of his favorite officers would be Wellington’s first target.

Elizabeth very nearly gave into the ignoble impulse to volunteer Darcy to a mime looking for targets in his audience. It would have been a delightful way to punish him for his overbearing disapproval. But then she spotted the Brandons, and bodily dragged Wellington through the crowd towards them.

As Wellington tended to like being manhandled by pretty women, he was more amused than otherwise, and acknowledged her muttered, “Beg pardon, Your Grace, but we need a diversionary measure for Darcy if ever we are to talk,” with a “Ha!”

"Lady Fitzwilliam!" exclaimed Mrs. Brandon, warmly. "Oh, and is this...?"

"The Duke of Wellington," said Elizabeth, clinging onto Wellington's arm and dipping into a curtsy, rather afraid that Mrs. Brandon would try to embrace her otherwise. "Your Grace, may I make known to you Mrs. Brandon, her husband Colonel Brandon, their ward Miss Williams and—” There was a fourth; it was with a great shock that she recognized, “Colonel Pascal?”

He was just as surprised, but recovered faster. “Lady Fitzwilliam. Your Grace.”

“I see Colonel Pascal is known to you?” said Colonel Brandon, a little puzzled.

Elizabeth and Colonel Pascal exchanged wary glances, each unsure what the other would care to reveal. Unwilling to let go of Wellington’s arm and lose the chance to speak privately with him, she tried to use the hand holding her muff to push back the brim of her bonnet, and scratch her temple. She nearly got a face full of fox fur for her troubles. “Um,” she said. “We— yes. Yes, at Hougoumont. Colonel Pascal was at Hougoumont, with my husband.”

Colonel Pascal stared at her, in renewed shock.

Elizabeth thought this an odd reaction until realized that she had been holding her muff before her, and Colonel Pascal had not realized she was pregnant until she had raised her arm, and her red pelisse trimmed with fox fur had been pulled taut over her swollen midsection. She felt a spurt of profound irritation at his surprise, and turned to gesture at the Darcy siblings, who had dutifully followed them. “I am shewing my cousins the art of _flanerie._ Would you care to join us?”

This was agreed to, and Wellington and Elizabeth hung back a little. When they were satisfied the others were distracted by a Harlequin beating a drum and singing about how much he loved onions, Wellington said, “All’s well in Cambrai. The only danger there is from the enlisted men drinking while on duty and accidentally setting their guns off. Has your husband found anything?”

“Neither he nor any of the... people... employed by the Foreign Office or the Embassy have uncovered anything but rumors,” she replied. “But he doesn’t think there are any plots, per se— it seemed to Lord Pumphrey that someone was trying to pull a Charlotte Corday.”

“Hm,” he said. “Tempted as I am, I shall avoid bathing in public. It is a sacrifice I _must_ make for the common good.”

She tried to look stern, but her “For God’s sake, Your Grace,” came out half laughter.

“Pumphrey say anything else?”

“His people seemed to think the assailant is still in Paris, but how they should know _that_ for certain I could not tell you. A man might very easily throw away coat and hat and pick up others if he wished to pass through the gates of Paris undetected.”

“I wonder,” mused Wellington, “why he attacked when he did.”

“I suppose he knew you would have to visit the Embassy at some point,” she replied. “And Lord Pumphrey thought that if an assassin really wished to cause an international incident, one could not do better than murdering the head of the Anglo-Allied Army on the steps of the English Embassy. He did pick a very precise time to aim at you, when he could have chosen any moment you were in your curricle. And it does send a remarkably clear message.” She spotted several men she knew from the Embassy, pretending to be interested in a slack rope dancer nearby. Elizabeth suddenly and badly wanted her husband. She began looking about, and noticed that her husband’s batsman, Mr. Pattinson, half-running down the street, pushing civilians aside.

This was odd.

Elizabeth tried to guess where Mr. Pattinson was running, since it wasn’t precisely towards them, and saw a man in French infantry uniform on the other side of the street. Infantryman or officer? Certainly an officer— the epaulettes on the shoulder glinted, gold braid winked from the end of the sleeve as the officer raised his pistol—

“I shall faint!” Elizabeth exclaimed.

Wellington fortunately understood exactly what she meant by this, and they both dropped suddenly to the ground. The crack of a pistol seemed to shatter her eardrums, and the ball itself pierced the drum of the dumbfounded Harlequin on the raised platform behind them. Darcy, who did not understand Elizabeth’s warning, turned immediately towards her.

“No, no, no!” Elizabeth tried to warn him, her stomach lurching— but it seemed too late— Darcy was before Wellington and the officer had another pistol and was taking desperate aim before the crowd panicked—

Miss Williams, who had been on Darcy's arm, had instinctively looked towards the sound of the shot; she dug in her heels, and yanked hard on Darcy’s arm, forcing Darcy to stumble and swing about her, catapulting into Mrs. Brandon, and well out of danger.

_Crack!_

The ball hit the cobblestone where Darcy had been standing; Wellington half-turned and raised his right arm to shield both their faces from the the spark, and the flying stone chips. They were crouching, Elizabeth still clutching Wellington’s left arm; he levered her up like a jack, and she dragged him to the base of the Harlequin’s platform, just as the crowd caught onto what was happening and began to panic. Wellington turned and extended his right arm before her, pinning her against the edge of the platform, so that no one could sweep her away. Elizabeth looked down and noticed a rip in Wellington's sleeve, edges of which were damp with blood. “I think you were injured, Your Grace."

“Bit of flying cobblestone,” he replied, glancing at it. “Damned inconvenient.”

Colonel Pascal slid through the terrified crowd towards them. He whipped out his handkerchief and climbed onto the platform in one smooth movement, as if he had been an acrobat about to begin his act. “If you would kindly raise your arm, Your Grace?”

As Colonel Pascal set to work, Elizabeth tried to scan the crowd for their assailant. She thought, for a moment, that she saw Mr. Pattinson grappling with someone, but she lost sight of him the next moment. To her left she saw Colonel Brandon had taken charge of the rest of their party; the ladies he had boosted onto the same platform where Colonel Pascal knelt; Miss Williams ran to the curtains, and twitching them back, cried, “Here is a door to the theatre!”

“I think that is our exit cue,” said Elizabeth, turning and putting her hands flat on the edge of the platform. She could not quite lift herself up. Colonel Pascal seized her by the upper arms and hauled; she improvised a ungainly scramble, aided by a helpful but inelegant push from Wellington, that allowed her to put a foot to the edge of the platform and get up. She pushed her muff up her arm so that it hung about her elbow and she and Colonel Pascal moved to pull up Wellington— a flash of gold epaulettes caused Elizabeth to sharply turn her head— for a moment hope blazed, burning up her fear, but she thought perhaps she imagined the red broadcloth, her observations colored by her profound longing for her husband. Another glint of gold, closer now— but gold on dark blue.

“ _Villainton_!” roared the officer, lunging out of the crowd. He had to spring diagonally from the flow of fleeing people; he passed right under Elizabeth—

Elizabeth, with more instinct than conscious thought, swore loudly and jammed her fox fur muff over the man’s head.

Colonel Pascal pulled up Wellington thus relatively unimpeded. Wellington turned to look down at his assailant, and was bemused to see the French officer holding neither pistol nor sword, but trying to tug a tube of fox fur off of his head. The man suddenly crumpled forward in the middle of this, revealing Colonel Sir Richard Fitzwilliam, holding up his sword, the butt of which he had clearly brought down on the back of the assassin's head.

“Perhaps you might reconsider walking without a guard, Your Grace?” Sir Richard asked.

“With you and your wife about, I really cannot see the need for one,” said Wellington.

 

***

 

Though Wellington had not wanted fuss or panic, it could not be entirely avoided. Their party— Colonels Pascal and Fitzwilliam, Elizabeth, the Duke of Wellington, several infantrymen, and an unconscious French officer— was a conspicuous one. It was extremely fortunate that Lord Pumphrey, one of the Foreign Office’s best clean-up men, was already in Paris.

“Oh my dear,” he said, swanning into Sir Richard’s office, beautifully attired and smelling of violets, “I am so glad I thought, ‘well what on earth will Lady Fitzwilliam do if she cannot blow up powder wagons?’ when your husband was making noises about wanting to get out of the army. You are more help to me than most ambassadors. Though I must admit, I never thought you an admirer of Madame Recamier, receiving visitors while reclining like a Roman.”

Elizabeth was sprawled on a Directoire-style sofa, and had made no move to get up. She merely extended a hand to him and said, “My lord, I am six months pregnant, and just fought off an assassin. I rise for no man.”

He chuckled and kissed the air above her hand. “Very true, but for now, let us keep that latter reason a secret between us, His Grace, and your dear husband.”

“It will have to be a secret extended to my husband’s cousins, the Darcys. And Colonel Brandon, his wife, and his ward— and Colonel Pascal,” she added, gesturing to him. Colonel Pascal had just finished dressing the Duke of Wellington’s wound with vinegar and had come in to avail himself of the tea service on Sir Richard's desk.

“Bénet, my dear,” said Lord Pumphrey. “I haven’t seen you this age.” He glanced at Elizabeth and said, “Nor did I expect to see you in this company.”

“These are circumstances which have rather surprised us all,” said Colonel Pascal. He handed Elizabeth a cup and coughed. His cough was very delicate, like a communion waiver snapping in half. “Madame— Lady Fitzwilliam, that is, I wonder if...?” He gestured at her stomach. “Has there been any movement since today’s... events?”

“No,” said Elizabeth, striving to sound nonchalant. “I— I rather thought there might be, but... no. I haven’t felt anything.” She was terribly worried; she had felt odd lurching in her stomach after the first pistol shot, but was not sure if this had been due to her nerves or her child. Now that the danger was past, and her child did not move, she was inclined to think it had been nerves, and was, ironically, more nervous than ever.

“Try the tea.”

She did. It had far too much sugar in it. Elizabeth managed only a couple of sips.

Lord Pumphrey interrupted, “Not to interrupt whatever... this... is....”

“It is me practicing medicine,” said Colonel Pascal, quellingly, handing Lord Pumphrey a cup of tea. “What did the assassin say?”

“I have a fellow working for me who makes men rather chatty. Our Frenchman confessed that he was working alone. He thought to kill His Grace, the Duke of Wellington as revenge for Waterloo. Our Frenchman was absolutely gutted by our beating Boney and setting him on a rock in the middle of the Atlantic. I am afraid, my dear lady, that you were part of his scheme too.”

“Me?” asked Elizabeth, astonished enough to spill the full cup of tea onto her stomach.

“Yes, our Frenchman believed the popular rumor that you were His Grace’s mistress. If he shot at Wellington while you were about, His Grace would of course try to protect you, thus thus allowing a second pistol shot to succeed if the first should fail. The first time appears to have been rather meticulously planned, to the extent that he even dug himself a little hidey-hole in the cellar of an abandoned house and thereby escaped the notice of your husband’s men.”

“Why put the uniform on again when he was seen in it?” Colonel Pascal asked, neatly exchanging Elizabeth’s empty cup of tea for a fresh one. “Drink please, my lady.”

“Out of loyalty for Bonaparte. Our Frenchman was deeply ashamed that the Old Guard, of which he was a part, broke and ran at Waterloo. He hoped to restore his regiment's glory by this new action. But, having nearly been caught, and seeing as Your Ladyship avoided going about in public with Lord Wellington for three weeks thereafter, our Frenchman was convinced that today was his only opportunity. This attempt seems to have arisen from the impulse of the moment, rather than previous study.” Lord Pumphrey looked terrifically amused. “It is too bad our French friend did not realize he was not taking advantage of a structural weakness, in so relying upon the presence of Lady Fitzwilliam, but running headfirst into a redoubt. Or into a fox fur muff, as the case actually was.”

Elizabeth was not very pleased with the compliment, and the over-sugared tea she had choked down during Lord Pumphrey’s explanation had not sweetened her temper. “I hate that rumor.”

“But it was the saving of His Grace!”

Elizabeth narrowed her eyes at Lord Pumphrey. “ _You_ did not plant such a rumor, did you, my lord?”

Lord Pumphrey sighed. “Alas that I was not clever enough to think of it. But I confess that I did nothing to dampen it. It seemed very likely to be useful.”

“You— _oh_!”

“I appreciate your ladyship’s delicacy in not saying what she is thinking,” said Lord Pumphrey, amused.

Elizabeth was not even paying attention to him; she thrust her empty cup onto a table and put her hand over the ticklish internal flutter in her left side. “I think— is the child quickening?”

“If you permit it?” asked Colonel Pascal, and at her nod, placed his palm against the flutter. His expression was strange, and difficult for Elizabeth to interpret, though she searched his face desperately for reassurance. “Yes,” he said, after a moment. “That is the child moving. You are fine, my lady.”

Sir Richard walked in then, saying, “Lord Pumphrey, the Ambassador’s secretary saw us returning, I do not think we can play this off as a thief picking the wrong target—” and looked rather nonplussed at the scene that met him.

“Everything’s fine,” said Elizabeth, with a rush of relief. “Might I have your receipt for the tea, Colonel Pascal?”

“It’s an old wives’ trick, merely,” he said, removing his hand. “Orange juice or lemonade could have worked as well. For whatever reason, drinking something sweet often causes such movement.”

She thanked him heartily. Sir Richard belatedly echoed her.

“As fascinated as I am by this tableau,” said Lord Pumphrey, “there _was_ an attempt on the life of the Duke of Wellington, and it appears now that there were too many witnesses to damp it down on my own. I shall need you all to play this down— you and all the other witnesses to this. Is that understood? Make it comic. This attempt on Wellington’s life was stupid and doomed to fail because of the might and talent of the British Army. As long as the army is in France, any attempt to drag us back into war will fail. If this is managed correctly, we can get away without further violence, and put an end to all the French officials demanding we lessen our military presence.”

Visits were made and reports soon pushed up into the various bureaucracies of both governments, where a great deal of paperwork was generated, and all Lord Pumphrey’s early discoveries were confirmed. The assassin had acted alone, somewhat impulsively, and was still rather annoyed he did not achieve his object.

Both governments were for some time quite distressed to find out that this attempt had absolutely no relation to any of the plots they had already known about, and the French authorities had to make some quite arbitrary arrests to make themselves feel better, which helped not at all and inspired not only several angry open letters, but ten stanzas of a poem by Lord Byron. Wellington could not be persuaded to accept a guard, but he did (grudgingly) return to the habit of his Peninsular days, and traveled in state with four or five aides-de-campe about him at all times.

When at last Lord Pumphrey left a dinner at her house satisfied enough to chivvy Wellington and his glittering array of aides out of Paris and back to Cambrai, and their more normal peacekeeping duties, Elizabeth spun around, snapping her fingers in a very bad and impromptu flamenco dance.

Sir Richard grinned and tried to clap out a beat. The Darcys, who had attached themselves onto the Brandons ever since the Boulevard du Temple like a sticking plaster, watched this somewhat mystified, though Colonel Pascal laughed and said, “I am glad Wellington has left for Cambrai and has not seen this bit of plagiarism, Lady Fitzwilliam.”

“He does not have an exclusive right to badly dance the flamenco,” she replied, striking a pose.

“It is a right that belongs to every British citizen,” agreed Sir Richard. “Shall we to the drawing room for tea?”

This they did. Elizabeth was surprised at herself for spending the first part of the evening joking with Colonel Pascal, whom she thought would always treat her with a sort of awkward delicacy. A strange battlefield camaraderie had replaced this, and that evening he turned to her and said, “Lady Fitzwilliam, I hope you will forgive me for being so wrong about you in every particular.”

“I think my husband might appreciate hearing of that,” she said, a little startled.

Darcy had come up for a refill of tea, and, overhearing this, looked curious.

“An old argument,” said Elizabeth, taking his cup, “between Colonel Pascal and my husband. That is all.”

Colonel Pascal smiled at her, and said, “But one last thing before I leave you, Lady Fitzwilliam— I am glad, at least once in my life, to have seen a true match.”

Elizabeth beamed at this praise, and was not in the least surprised to see that this had embarrassed and discomfited Darcy. He did not like talking about feelings. But still, when he made noises about the room being hot, and wandered off before taking back his tea, Elizabeth felt rather bad. Darcy had been quiet— even for him— after they had returned from the Boulevard du Temple. What he had seen was so far from all he had experienced before, and for a man accustomed to order and command, such riotous, uncontrollable disorder could only unsettle his mind. And though Elizabeth knew that Darcy had predicted that France was still not a safe place to visit, he could hardly have imagined he would be caught up in an assassination attempt. He had listened to her apology for being wrong, given incoherently but sincerely the evening of the assassination attempt, almost in a torpor, and had been clearly unitnerested in all her attempts to revisit the subject.

She drew a red Kashmir shawl with gold medallions about her shoulders and walked out to see Darcy standing on the balustrade, his arms stretched to the side, and his hands resting lightly on the railing before him. He appeared observing the night sky through the branches of the trees. Upon hearing her, Darcy turned his head slightly, but did not glare her away. She chose to interpret this optimistically and came forward. “Darcy,” said she, smilingly, “I do not mean to intrude upon your solitude, but I think you will enjoy it more with a cup of tea.”

“Thank you,” said Darcy, not really moving. Elizabeth set the cup down by his right hand, and hesitated a moment before saying, “I recall how shaken I felt after seeing my first action. I had nothing to compare it to, or any way to fit it into my understanding of the world. But one becomes accustomed to it soon enough. Indeed, life can seem very dull without them.”

He asked, “What?” almost as if he hadn’t heard her.

Elizabeth repeated herself and he said, slowly, “You are suited to this life, I think.”

“I like to think that I am of a hearty and cheerful enough disposition to be happy anywhere, but my friend Mrs. Kirke says I have fitted myself well to military life. That does make me sound a bit like a sentient wallpaper, but I do not think it a false characterization. I would not change my life for any other."

Darcy looked at her searchingly a minute before turning his gaze back up to the sky. “I think,” said he, in a tone of deliberate calm, “it is time to move on.”

“From Paris?” Elizabeth asked, not very surprised.

He said, haltingly, “From— from Paris, yes.”

“Well, I cannot say that at all surprises me, after all you have suffered, but I hope there has been enough pleasure to balance out the pain, at the very least.”

“I think the whole experience has improved me, rather,” said Darcy, picking up the cup. “I will not deny there have been moments where I have thought otherwise, but I have got through the worst of it.” He seemed to be in an oddly confessional mood, for he voluntarily offered the information, “For rather too long I made myself miserable— about Paris.”

Elizabeth searched her memory. She honestly could not remember Darcy ever talking about Paris until being invited there and hating the idea. “I thought you found nothing even tolerable about it.”

“Perhaps at first, but the more I disparaged it, the more I became bewitched by it.”

Elizabeth smiled, much amused that Darcy should have come down with so prosaic an infection of the Englishman abroad: falling grudgingly in love with Paris.

“By the time I finished insisting to all my friends that there was hardly a good feature about the city, I was lost.”

Elizabeth laughed. “Of course that is how it was with you. I daresay you were mortified at yourself. Oh Darcy! Despite your lamentable tendency to be right in arguments, you are one of my favorite relations through marriage; your character is always such a pleasure to examine. There is a strange unwillingness to your affections, but once they are given, how strong a hold they take on you!”

Darcy seemed darkly amused by this characterization. “I cannot contradict you on that point.” He put down his empty cup on the railing. In a more thoughtful tone, he said, “I think I will always be fond of Paris, and it will always occupy a high place in my affections. It will be the work of years to keep from comparing every city I see to her, but I am beginning to think that perhaps I must try to be happy elsewhere.”

“Is it so impossible for you to live in Paris, if that is how you feel about it?”

“Duty and obligation forbid it.”

Elizabeth thought this somewhat ridiculous, before recalling just how large Pemberley was, and how many people relied on him there. Then too, he had been spending a great deal of time with the Brandons. Their penchant for drama had probably rubbed off on him. “I suppose you can never leave Derbyshire for long. But you are welcome to visit us here; we are stationed in Paris until 1818 at least.”

Darcy inclined his head. “I shall always keep with me the memory of your jamming a fox fur muff onto the head of a French assassin,” he added, somewhat unexpectedly. “No one shall ever take that away from me.”

Elizabeth laughed. “And of my swearing like an infantryman the whole time, no doubt!”

“I will endeavor to forget that part if you like.”

“It would gratify my self-love but little else. I give you leave to remember me however you chose.”

Darcy’s gaze was unexpectedly soft. “Thank you. I shall.”

There fell a little pause. Elizabeth asked, “Where do you think you shall go now?”

“I am not sure. Georgianna has always wished to see Italy.”

“If you go north you shall not be much bothered. The Anglo-Allied Army is... settled there. And there is a demilitarized zone that extends towards Switzerland, though I wouldn't advise traversing the Alps in the winter. Or, if you prefer, the Brandons will be heading towards Avignon on Wednesday, where Colonel Brandon’s sister lives. I am sure they would be glad your company.”

“Perhaps I shall.”

At the end of the week, the Darcys had decided upon Switzerland and Italy, but promised to come spend some time in Avignon before returning to Paris and thence again to London.

“I believe we will have a new acquaintance to introduce by then,” said Richard, with a fond smile at Elizabeth.

“I will personally ensure it,” said Elizabeth, dryly.

 

***

 

When the time came, however, Elizabeth found this a seemingly impossible task. The first few hours she had been optimistic, and had been fine with all her sisters (save Lydia, who was still in China) and her mother flitting in and out of her room, and laughed at the reports of Sir Richard refusing to go to the Embassy in favor of pacing in his study, and drinking far too much brandy with Mr. Bingley and Mr. Bennet. But early morning dragged on into evening, and she was still no closer to actually giving birth.

“I can't,” said Elizabeth, sometime after midnight, when only Jane, Mrs. Bennet, and the midwife and her assistant remained awake. “I can't push. I refuse to push. The very notion of pushing appalls every proper feeling.”

“ _Does_ it, Lady Fitzwilliam?” Mrs. Bennet asked, rather tartly. “And how, pray, shall you bring your child into the world?”

“I am really very resigned to having a Macduff instead,” said Elizabeth. “Let her be from her mother's womb untimely ripped. It shall offer considerable advantage against Scottish autocrats.”

“Oh I knew how this would be,” lamented Mrs. Bennet. “I saw it all before it even came to pass, but does anyone listen to me?”

“What do you mean?” Elizabeth cried, through a fresh wave of pain.

“Never mind what I meant,” said Mrs. Bennet. “If you are determined not to push, you are determined.”

“I must know your meaning,” said Elizabeth, now furiously angry from the intensity of a contraction. “What prophecy have you uttered? And was it to a king of Scotland?”

“You take great delight in vexing me,” said Mrs. Bennet. “I should refuse to answer you for all your running on about Scotland.”

Elizabeth cried out in pain and vexation.

“Very well! All I meant was that any child of yours would be just as headstrong as you. A full two days it took, bringing you into the world! You are well repaid, Miss Lizzy! Refuse to walk, even though I usually cannot get you to stop! Ignore the midwife, even though she delivered Napoleon’s own son. Take _three_ days to give Sir Richard his first child. Will that surprise me? No. No _indeed_. It shall not surprise me at all.”

Elizabeth had really thought she had no strength left, but she discovered that she had an endless supply of spite. She got up and walked and obeyed the midwife and pushed, even when she did not think it possible to do so. It seemed an eternity before the midwife become suddenly excited and bade her lay down, though the clock disobligingly told her only fifteen minutes had passed. There was nothing more that Elizabeth wanted in the world than to lay down and cry, but Mrs. Bennet came to her side and taking Elizabeth’s hand, patted it and said, “Well, at least I shall not have to amend my letter to my sister Mrs. Phillips. I shall send it off saying ‘Elizabeth is in daily expectation of her confinement. The silly girl will be in expectation of it until April.’”

Elizabeth had no breath for a protest greater than a baleful glare, but she seized her mother’s hand and braced herself, as the midwife had been asking her to do. There seemed a strange disconnect between the noise around her and her ability to understand it; it was with difficulty that the sounds resolved themselves into words. The pain became shockingly intense; she turned her head to try and muffle the sound of her own cries in the pillow, but it seemed to do nothing. She kept pushing and weeping—and clinging to her mother, as she had not done since she was a very small child, ill with mumps and terribly afraid the pain would kill her. Mrs. Bennet began stroking Elizabeth’s hair, in precisely the way that had soothed Elizabeth since earliest childhood. Elizabeth was shocked to realize that in all probability, the first person to have done this, and the person who had taught her to be calmed in this fashion, was her mother. It hurt tremendously to push; she felt as if she could not stand it a second longer, or continue to push through such agony.

“There now,” said Mrs. Bennet. “Keep pushing Lizzy, and it will soon all be over!”

Elizabeth obeyed, though the effort made her feel horribly faint. She was incapable of doing anything but clinging to her own mother, of hearing anything— then, in what seemed like a strange, disconnected moment, Jane was rubbing eau de cologne on her temples and someone else seemed to be crying and the midwife was excited and speaking in French much too rapid to follow.

“ _There_ now, Lizzy,” said Mrs. Bennet, who was cradling her. “You quite frightened us, fainting like that. But it is all out! You are all done. Was that so very bad?”

“Yes,” said Elizabeth. “But it is done?”

“It is done! What is the midwife saying, Jane?”

“That the placenta is all out, and that she does not think there is any chance of childbed fever.” Jane kissed Elizabeth and said, “Oh Lizzy! You have a daughter! She is so beautiful! Madame, may I?” Jane gently took a wailing, cloth-wrapped bundle from the midwife, and laughing, said, “Lizzy, you must let go of Mama. Then you may hold her.”

Elizabeth, recalling how Mrs. Bennet had chosen to break the news of little Jenny Bingley’s birth, said, “Mama, do not leave me, please.”

“Of course not,” said Mrs. Bennet, still stroking Elizabeth’s hair. “It is very disappointing, I am sure, but Sir Richard is a second son, he cannot have much property he is anxious to pass down. I am sure he will take the news of a daughter very well.”

“Do not tell him Mama,” begged Elizabeth, who, though feeling slightly delirious, was very certain on this point.

“There, there, my dear Lady Fitzwilliam,” said Mrs. Bennet. “That is alright. That is only natural. A girl wants her mother after such a first disappointment.”

But Elizabeth could not consider a healthy daughter a disappointment, especially when she somehow had _not_ died in childbirth, as she had been terrified she would. She held out her arms for— oh how strange it seemed!— her _daughter_. Elizabeth was overwhelmed with wonder, enough to forget the pain she still felt, and to ignore the alarms she felt at the midwife’s talk about stitches and bleeding. Her mind skittered over the reading she had been doing before being brought to bed— an eclectic mix of Burke’s theory of the sublime and Renaissance blazon poetry— but both seemed apt. Elizabeth looked down into her daughter’s face and could not agree with Jane. Her daughter was not beautiful, she was sublime— Elizabeth already felt this tiny creature, who had had the power to destroy her, now had the power to compel her and suspend her soul in the greatest astonishment. The whole of her daughter was too wondrous to describe. Like nearly every new parent, Elizabeth thought herself unique in her desire to examine and praise each part of the little body in her arms. Having satisfied herself that her child had all the usual number of appendages and facial features, and sentimentally compared them to everything she liked best in the world, Elizabeth raised the child in her trembling arms and laid a first kiss upon the wrinkled brow.    

“I wonder if she will have her father’s eyes or mine,” said Elizabeth, lowering the child. It was currently impossible to tell, as the new Miss Fitzwilliam had her eyes screwed up, to better aid her in her grand plan of making as much noise as possible.  “Hush now, little one, let me see the color?”

“Oh, they will stay blue for a six month,” said Jane, sitting on the edge of the bed, on Elizabeth’s other side. “Sometimes longer. Jenny’s did not change at all.”

Elizabeth tore herself from the rapt contemplation of how her daughter's reddening, scrunched face was beginning to smooth itself out to ask, “Has anyone told Sir Richard?”

“I shall go,” said Jane, bending down to kiss her niece on the forehead.

“Oh yes, Jane will soften him up for you,” agreed Mrs. Bennet.

Elizabeth wanted to protest that her husband needed no softening up, and was probably, at that moment, a mess of nerves and sarcasm, held together only by brandy and the discipline engendered by half a lifetime of military service. The news that he was a father and was still a husband would make him giddy with joy. Nor did she really think her husband would be so unreasonable as to be disappointed with a daughter. Indeed, it seemed to her absurd he would be anything but delighted. Perhaps he would be unconscious or drunk, she thought, stroking the tiny, curled fingers, with her own fingertip; those were definite possibilities, but he would be happy beyond anything. He had gained what he had always wanted, and what he had, for many years, never dreamed of achieving.

Jane returned just as Miss Fitzwilliam had grown tolerably resigned to being alive, and began grizzling instead of outright screaming.

“There, there, my pretty sweeting,” Elizabeth murmured, gently stroking a tiny red cheek with her forefinger. “What a good girl you are.”

“Sir Richard sent you a present,” said Jane, displaying what was unmistakably a jewelry case.

Elizabeth heaved a sigh, though admitted to herself that she would have been very disappointed if there hadn't been one. “Of course. We have just dramatically increased our household costs and expenditures, and he runs off to the jeweler’s. The man has no notion of budget or economy.”

“And why should he?” Mrs. Bennet demanded, taking the jewel case and looking into it. “Second son of an Earl, of course he has no notion of _economy,_ I daresay the very word was considered vulgar when he was growing up. Oh look at this! How _very fine_!” She lifted out all the pieces of a cameo parure, set with gold and pearls. "You know, Lizzy, I saw a little portrait of the Empress Josephine wearing something very like, and all the French ladies seem to be wearing cameos. It is very much the fashion."

Elizabeth pretended to be smiling down at her daughter, rather than smiling at the knowledge that her husband had noticed all her sighings over cameos in shop windows, and her pointed admiration of similar sets at balls and dinners. "Jane, did Richard insist upon seeing his daughter? If he did, perhaps he might come up. I cannot bear to let go of her just yet.”

“Oh no,” said Jane, soothingly. “Do not worry, Lizzy, I shall make sure you will be undisturbed and have your rest. I remember how it was just after I had Jenny, and how it was to feel so exhausted and overwhelmed I could think of nothing but sleep. Richard did ask if he could see you, but I told him that was a breach of custom.”

“Is it the custom in France?” Elizabeth asked, hoping it wasn't. The only way to augment her current happiness, she was sure, was to show off the perfection of her daughter to the other person intimately concerned in her production.

“It is _English_ custom my girl,” said Mrs. Bennet tartly. “You are a lady now, you ought to behave like it. But there, the little dear is quieting. It is too bad you did not have a son, but what a sweet, pretty girl she is. I daresay Sir Richard will not be too disappointed. He does not seem the sort to hold it against you.”

“Mama,” said Jane, with mild reproof, “Richard started beaming when I told him he had a daughter. This news delighted him as much as it delighted Charles. You must not be thinking Lizzy and I married men who are not sensible of the value of daughters as well as sons.”

To Elizabeth’s dismay, she did have to hand over her daugher to the midwife, so that the two of them could be tided up, and the bed linens changed. Elizabeth had not thought she would ever feel pain again, after so euphoric a feeling as getting to hold her own child, but was swiftly proven wrong. Elizabeth did not enjoy all the tidying up necessary after so messy a process as childbirth, nor the necessary stiches and clouts, and warnings about the unpleasant after effects of childbirth. Jane bore off little Miss Fitzwilliam to meet the rest of her relations during this particular lecture, which made Elizabeth too anxious to pay attention at all. The midwife’s assistant had to go and wake Mrs. Pattinson and give instructions to her, when it became clear Elizabeth was not taking in anything that was being said to her. After what felt like hours, Elizabeth was wrapped up in clouts and a clean nightrail, tucked into bed, and admonished in both French and English to stay in bed and rest. The midwife departed with a promise to call again in the morning, to see how Elizabeth was getting on.

To Elizabeth’s surprise, Mrs. Bennet dismissed Mrs. Pattinson and brushed and braided Elizabeth’s sweaty, snarled hair herself.

“There, now,” said Mrs. Bennet. “What a fine thing you have done, my dear. You are a mother! To think I should have two daughters so well married, with daughters of their own! Oh, God has been very good to the Bennets. You were such a good girl, Miss Lizzy, you did so very well.”

After taking a moment to wonder if the delirium of nearly twenty hours of labor had caused her to imagine this praise from her mother, Elizabeth asked, “Do you really think so, Mama?”

“Yes, my girl, you have done very well. It was very hard. I did not wish to alarm you but when you fainted dead away I had such fluttering and spasms as you could never believe! But then I told myself, of all my daughters, who rallies the quickest? Why, it is my dear Lady Fitzwilliam.” Elizabeth was lying on her side, arms around her still aching abdomen; Mrs. Bennet smoothed down the hair at the nape of her neck. “My own little Lizzy. Of course she would pull though; she has too much spirit to be felled by so little a thing as childbirth.”

Elizabeth managed a laugh and was surprised at how much she meant it when she said, “I am glad you were here, Mama.” 

*** 

Elizabeth had no clear recollection of falling asleep, but some time later, she woke to see someone leaning over her child’s cradle. If she hadn't heard a soft, “Lizzy, are you awake?” she probably would have run across the room and tackled the intruder to the floor, her own pain and the orders for bed rest be damned. But the fury transformed itself almost immediately to joy when she recognized her husband’s voice. She had pushed herself up and now eagerly reached for him, with a glad cry of, “Richard!”

In two steps he had her in his arms, and kissing her forehead, whispered in a tone of profound relief, “Oh my dear, my very dear Lizzy! You are well? The child is well I know, but you are well?”

“Yes—and technically you ought not to be here.”

“Do you wish me gone?”

“Never!” She rested her head against the velvet lapel of his dressing gown. “There were times today— or is it yesterday?—where I wanted you extremely! But I am not sure you would have been easy being in the room.”

“I was not easy hearing you,” said Richard, stroking her hair. “My God, Lizzy, I have never been so terrified in all my life! I must have apologized to Bingley half-a-dozen times for teasing him for nearly fainting over Jenny’s birth. I was very near that state myself. It is in every way horrible, knowing two people you love are in danger and pain, and not being able to do anything about it.”

“I understand now,” said Elizabeth, “why the Spartans equated men dying on the battlefield, and women dying in childbed. It was really quite awful— but I would and probably will do it again if it results in anything half so perfect as... what are we calling her? Elizabeth, still?”

“I haven’t said anything to anyone. I thought you ought to name her.”

Elizabeth was quite surprised by this. She had always thought the naming of children to be a father’s prerogative. “Oh! I hadn't thought— well, who will stand as godparents? Jane, of course, and...?”

“The Duke of Wellington.”

Elizabeth pulled back to stare at her husband. “The _Duke of Wellington_?”

“We _did_ save his life.”

The baby began to cry.

“Hide there!” Elizabeth pointed at the chairs still clustered by her bed. Her husband inelegantly dove behind them as Mrs. Pattinson came in, holding a candle. Elizabeth attempted to rise.

“Your Ladyship, get back into bed! Quicktime now!"

“The baby is crying," Elizabeth protested.

“The poor dear is hungry, is all,” said Mrs. Pattinson. “I recognize that cry right enough. Do you know how to feed her, madam?”

“I have seen Jane do it,” said Elizabeth uncertainly, but as everything came naturally and easily to Jane, this was not particularly helpful. Elizabeth was utterly at sea.

Mrs. Pattinson was longer in arranging Elizabeth and the child than she usually was in arranging Elizabeth’s hair for balls. It was a vexing process and Elizabeth was ready to burst into tears herself when at last the baby realized what it was supposed to do and latched on. Elizabeth gave a glad cry, and nearly, stupidly, announced her triumph to her husband, but instead said, “Oh she has done it! What a clever girl she is. Thank you Mrs. Pattinson, I should be completely lost without you. Where are your children, pray?”

“I've two boys in the army,” said Mrs. Pattinson, proudly. “My youngest is a corporal in the Welsh Guards, but the eldest was made a _sergeant_ after Waterloo. And I've a daughter in between them— though Lord bless me, I said that wrong, as she don't follow the drum. She went back to my father and learned his trade as a hairdresser and is a lady’s maid in Ireland, for a Mrs. Dixon.”

“I am so pleased to hear your children are all so accomplished,” said Elizabeth, proud to share in this warm maternal glow.

“Well,” said Mrs. Pattinson, modestly, “they are uncommon good children, if I do say so myself.” She fluffed a pillow and stuck it under Elizabeth's right elbow. “And madam, if I may be so bold, you should not hold to any of this modern nonsense about closed rooms and no visitors. All of em, even my two boys that died at the siege of Badajoz, were born on the back of a supply cart, with all the other wives about me, and Mr. Pattinson came and saw ‘em soon as the march was done for the day. There was no harm done to 'em, and it raised my spirits when I was feeling low and tired. Right, time to switch sides. Let me help your ladyship, it’ll feel natural to you soon, I promise.”  

“Thank you,” said Elizabeth.

Mrs. Pattinson adjusted the pillow and said, “There now. And perhaps Sir Richard will stop sitting on the floor, hiding behind them chairs now that I am going back to your dressing room, your ladyship?”

“Um,” said Elizabeth.

Sir Richard gave up and stood, brushing off his dressing gown. “Mrs. Pattinson.”

She looked rather amused. “Sir.”

Sir Richard cleared his throat. “I would appreciate it if you didn't mention this to my mother-in-law.”

“Of course not, sir,” said Mrs. Pattinson, as if it were quite natural for a man who had spent most of his adult life fighting Europe’s most formidable armies to be terrified of his wife’s mother. “There we go Your Ladyship; no need to look so worried, the child's just finished. Come here and sit next to her ladyship, sir, your daughter will be very sweet now she's had her supper.”

Mrs. Pattinson showed Sir Richard how to hold so tiny a child— he had never been offered the chance to hold an infant before— and then went back to Elizabeth’s dressing room to sleep.

“Your maid is quite terrifying,” said Sir Richard, gently stroking his daughter’s tiny cheek with a fingertip.

“ _Tres formidable_ , as the French say,” agreed Elizabeth, retying the ribbon of her nightgown.

“You are a match then,” said Sir Richard, with a soft laugh. He turned to look down at his daughter, again,with an utterly besotted look. “I don't think I have ever seen a more beautiful child.”

Elizabeth laughed. “Richard, you can hardly see anything. But I cannot fault you. As soon as I held her I was very firmly convinced I would murder a man in cold blood if he dared to hurt her.”

“Oh yes, there is that too,” he admitted, with a disarming smile. “I would cut my way through an entire battalion if ever she was in trouble. I felt quite the same way about you, after we were married.”

“Did you? Oh darling, I am flattered! But I hope I have made that unnecessary.”

“Yes, I know you’ll threaten to blow up a powder wagon, or dose all your captors with laudanum, or something similar. I have few worries about your ever being in danger, on or off a battlefield. Speaking of— if you don’t like Elizabeth, would it be too on the nose to call her ‘Waterloo’?”

“Entirely! You might as well call her ‘Hackney Coach.’”

Richard laughed. “Perhaps Lavender?”

“Lavender Fitzwilliam? I think not. That sounds like the name of an actress famous for crying on cue in melodramas.” Elizabeth sank back into the pillows and closed her eyes a moment, feeling a dazed happiness tuck itself around her, like a warm blanket. “What say you to Victoria? It _was_ a great victory.”

“Waterloo?”

“Everything about it and afterwards.”

“I do like the sound of ‘Victoria Fitzwilliam.’”

“Victoria _Jane_ Fitzwilliam,” said Elizabeth. “It sounds very elegant. I can see her drawling witticisms in drawing rooms. I already anticipate her marriage to her cousin Spencer being the society event of the season.”

“Oh come, Lizzy, she is only four hours old. Do not marry her off already.”

She laughed. “I am as bad as my own mother. And Victoria Jane might prefer a woman. Shame on Lady Fitzwilliam. All her liberal principles go entirely out the window as soon as she has a daughter. No, no, Miss Fitzwilliam need not marry anyone at all. Perhaps she will instead be a brilliant mathematician and be wedded to her career instead of any person.”

“Why a mathematician?”

“Or a chemist or an astronomer or somesuch. I fancy her as an author, actually. I already see title pages with ‘Victoria Jane Fitzwilliam’ stamped on them. I hope she shall be a novelist, but I could resign myself to a historian— hopefully not an Egyptologist. One per family seems too many.”

“I shall love and support Victoria Jane even if she does the unthinkable and become an Egyptologist.”

"I am very glad to know you will support her no matter what she becomes, or chooses to be. I think it shows remarkable foresight on my part, to have chosen to marry a man such as you.”

"I think marrying you was quite the best choice I have ever made," he replied, putting an arm about her, "so I am glad we are agreed on that. I have heard one must present a united front to one's children." Sir Richard pressed his lips to her hair, with a soft, "Te amo, dear Bennet." Elizabeth rested her head against the side of his neck and then placed a hand on their daughter’s swaddled chest. Victoria Jane’s breathing was soft but steady.

She felt full up with love; she could not contain such happiness. It overflowed in a fervent, “Te amo, my two dearest Fitzwilliams.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WE ARE DONE with this particular ending of this Choose Your Own Adventure (well, husband) fic for Lizzy Bennet! Thank you so much to all of you who have read and reviewed and encouraged me to embark upon this alternate path in the first place!

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Perrault's Soulmark Fairy Tales](https://archiveofourown.org/works/9540212) by [Sunfreckle](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sunfreckle/pseuds/Sunfreckle)




End file.
